The challenge in writing about the work of Tatiana Blass is to capture the chromatic pulsation of her work. She conquers silence with colors that shout. This is a rare, differentiated coloring, but one made of common colors, even banal ones, that at times verge on kitsch. To speak of color here is to speak of a decorative daring, of a disarmed will to take on a disconcerting beauty. It is disarmed in the sense that nothing in her work appears to be forced or artificial and it is disconcerting because it is surprising. How is a cool painting possible using such “Look at me!” colors? Another question arises in the face of these initial digressions: is beauty still a pertinent term desired by art? I fear this word due to a certain metaphysical impossibility. Time and multiple idealizations have taken from it any pregnancy of meaning. But how do we abandon it? Is it possible to give it some kind of contemporary value? Decorative is thus a deliberate act of cursing. Poor Matisse. We should point out, however, that this situation did not arise by chance; indeed, an empty estheticism and a co-opting in the face of the market’s decisions led to this complicated situation in which beauty lost its spirit and the decorative waived all esthetic rigor. For some, the beautiful is impotent since it will not allow itself to be grasped in intellectual terms, for others it is undesirable as it allows itself to be seduced by decorative brilliance.

It is in this minefield, in which conceptual impotence and ethical dissatisfaction immediately show themselves, that we seek to discuss beauty in the works in question. In the face of Tatiana Blass’ collages, paintings, objects and installations, we always find ourselves on our guard, our senses are awake, alert and ready. We encounter floppy but precise forms. A powerful mixture of boldness and intuition appears to direct her artistic actions. Here, intuition does not function as something spontaneous or easy that would give something of an ingenuous character to her poetics. No. What is presented is an almost physical wisdom of the materials, principally of the colors, which work through contrasts of texture and temperature. A painting that is often made with common materials and that appeals to our sense of touch. Exalted and timid colors coexist without accommodating each other. There are few young artists today who take on painting with the same freshness as Tatiana Blass.

Beauty is what produces a difference in our sensible link with our surroundings, with the outside. The autonomy of beauty arises at the same historic moment in which man assumed his political and spiritual maturity. This possibility of beauty coincides with the experience of a subject who is free to feel and judge, capable of placing oneself before the world without the constraints of an instrumental rationality that a priori distinguishes for us right from wrong and the artistic from the non-artistic. Schiller grasped this relationship between the autonomy of esthetic judgment and its political vocation – the full meaning of freedom. The free play of the faculties, dear to esthetic experience, corresponds to the free play between the anonymous citizens of the modern polis. Beauty must be understood as a singular happening, modeled on the sensible, which does not anticipate or even define itself a priori. It presents itself and we have to be ready. It is always different, always being common. It is the difference which arises in the middle of the common.

Here we return to the works of Tatiana Blass, who desires the common in their colors, materials and forms, in order to remove it from the realm of banality, indifference and sameness.

Her pieces often allow themselves to be contaminated by a kitsch atmosphere, but reject sensory excess. There is containment without any suffering. The affective tonality that runs through the work curiously mixes joy and tedium. But it is a tedium that does not inspire detachment, merely a shrug of the shoulders at what is not the gratuitous and immediate presence of the work. It is as if her pieces said “for me, it’s fine the way it is”. Setting aside the differences, I think that Baudelaire would have liked the attitude of these works.

Another important aspect that begins to appear in her work refers to the relationship between painting, collage, object and installation. In fact, I believe that everything leads to a notion of environment, of creating an environment, an atmosphere where the most common possible life may be lived in its original strangeness. Both on the canvas and outside it, in real space, what we perceive are fields of chromatic energy and sensual forms that propagate themselves and embrace us. It is a world of colors to be felt on the skin. It should also be said that her stories, her short literary pieces carry on a close dialogue with all of this.