READ ANTONIO GONÇALVES FILHO'S TEXT ABOUT THE PROJECT
For ArPa 2023, Millan holds a solo project by Tatiana Blass. The artist presents four sets of works, including paintings on canvas and on glass, sculptures, as well as a new series of ceramics.
With works created in different media, such as painting, sculpture, video, installation, and performances, Blass' poetics is embedded with references to theater, cinema, literature, and music.
By combining acrylic paint and gouache, the artist builds environments that resemble theater stages or circus tents interiors. In these canvases, the pictorial planes are diluted in subdued shades of turquoise, burgundy, and maroon, rendering the chairs, tables, and other objects that compose these scenarios indistinguishable from the background. The continuation of this research, which began in 2019 with the series Os sentados, also develops in the paintings in which Blass uses acrylic paste to add volume to the forms that suggest human faces and figures. Rather than annulling the play of indissolubility between planes, it is reinforced by the new corporeality obtained through the reliefs created by this technique.
As for the paintings on glass, there is an inversion of the traditional oil painting technique. Made on the "verso" of the surface, the first layer of enamel applied is always immediately visible, resisting the superposition of new layers. The absence is also a constituent part of these images as the artist creates cut-outs and intervals between the color fields on the glass surface.
The operation of dissolution, recurring in Blass's work, is inverted in her more recent ceramic works. In the Quebra-quebra series, broken ceramic objects from Vale do Jequitinhonha, traditional, and indigenous communities, are reconstructed by the addition of glazed ceramics in the colors found in her paintings. The new corporeality given to the ceramics by these bodies of color recalls the spatial investigation of painting already undertaken throughout Tatiana Blass' career. The reparative gesture in this series is also part of a breakthrough by the artist in response to the recent political context of devaluation of arts and traditional techniques, as well as to the current reparation movements.
By investigating the fraying of visual and symbolic language, her works allow us to glimpse the shortcomings and the erosion of experiences as narrated by conventional discourses and reason. Her work pushes the boundaries of visual languages and narrative experience. Subtracting the functionality, materiality, and integrity of objects and tangible elements from operations of smothering, melting, sealing, or corrosion, Blass dilutes and reconfigures experiences of temporality and contemplation.
ArPa 2023
Pacaembu Complex, São Paulo
May 31 to June 04
Booth B01
Tickets here