Tatiana Blass – Stage Crew

What turns a space into a stage? This question ran through much of the thinking on theater in the twentieth century. Rather than defining it solely through architecture or set design, directors and theorists came to understand it as a construction produced by the relation among bodies, objects, light, time, and movement. In The Empty Space (1968), for instance, director Peter Brook sums up this shift by stating that any empty space can become a stage, so that the scene no longer depends on a specific building; it comes into being whenever these relations take shape before a gaze. This is the world from which the word contrarregra comes: the person, part of a stage crew, who is responsible for organizing the wings and creating the conditions for a scene to happen.

The stage crew threads through this exhibition as a metaphor for Tatiana Blass’s (São Paulo, 1979) practice. Her work draws together materials, images, words, and different temporalities, creating pieces that stay open to the transformations that shape them.

Since the beginning of her trajectory, in the early 2000s, painting has been the starting point for a body of research that continually pushes past its own limits. Instead of staying confined to the surface of the canvas, it unfolds into sculptures, installations, videos, and performances, incorporating wax, glass, bronze, ceramic, and light.

Bringing together pieces from different moments in her career, the exhibition Contrarregra [Stage Crew] highlights questions that cut across her trajectory: characters blend into settings, landscapes emerge as patches of color, and objects waver between use and suspension. The works place less emphasis on stabilized forms than on the processes that produce them, revealing images caught between the beginning and the end of an action.

The word also holds a central place in this research. Present in titles, texts, videos, and songs, it neither explains the works nor assigns them a single meaning. Alongside the images, the word helps expand their meanings and build open-ended narratives.

Since its founding, Instituto Tomie Ohtake has dedicated part of its program to artists whose research expands the possibilities for exchange among different mediums. Tatiana Blass’s practice fits within this context, building a body of work in which painting, sculpture, video, performance, and writing become a single field of investigation.

We thank the Ministry of Culture, which made the exhibition Contrarregra possible through the Federal Culture Incentive Law (Rouanet Law). We are also grateful to musician Kiko Dinucci. The show is realized by Instituto Tomie Ohtake, with sponsorship from Nubank, our institutional patron, and support from Galeria Albuquerque Contemporânea.

 

Instituto Tomie Ohtake

Contrarregra [Stage Crew] brings together works produced by Tatiana Blass, a São Paulo-born artist based in Belo Horizonte, over nearly three decades of research, spanning paintings, sculptures, installations, and a group of new works. Though painting remains at the center of her practice, it is never confined to canvas: it moves through sculpture, writing, sound, video, and performance, functioning less as a medium than as a way of thinking about the relations among matter, space, light, and time.

The title borrows a term from the theater. The members of a stage crew organize the scene without occupying its center: preparing the stage, positioning objects, regulating entrances and exits, sustaining the event without ever appearing in it. Their work is almost always invisible, though everything that will be seen depends on it. They speak directly to Blass’s practice, more interested in the conditions that make the image possible than in the image as a result: what precedes the event, accompanies it, and keeps acting even after it seems to have ended.

The paintings gathered in the exhibition deepen this investigation. Human figures, chairs, landscapes, and architecture occupy scenes suspended between what has just happened and what is still to come. More than characters, these bodies function as a provisional measure of space, while the landscape takes on a presence that often exceeds the human scale. The narrative stays open, without resolution.

The hole is one of the key elements in this research. In some works, the pictorial surface is pierced by large perforations that interrupt the continuity of the image: emptiness stops signifying absence and instead becomes a kind of bodily measure against the vastness of the scene, in the same gesture that reduces the human figure to a discreet presence within the landscape. This same opening of the surface reappears, in a different form, in the paintings on glass: there, the transparency of the support lets the surrounding space through, so that architecture, light, and the visitor’s movement become part of the image itself, continually reorganized as the conditions of the scene change.

The transformation of matter is another important element in the exhibition. In the wax sculptures, heat and gravity keep acting throughout the course of the show, making melting a permanent condition of the work; in some pieces, the paint seems to run, as if the image were always caught between formation and disappearance. The works do not represent a transformation; they keep transforming.

In one of the rooms, musical instruments shift this investigation toward sound. A piano, a drum kit, and other objects preserve the memory of music while interrupting their own function, and silence becomes presence, a latent music. The word follows this same logic: in recent works, it takes on body, image, and duration, and it matters less for what it communicates than for the path between speaker and listener.

Part of the exhibition’s new paintings grew out of a collaboration with Kiko Dinucci. Invited by the musician to create images based on the songs from his new album, Medusa (2026), the artist does not illustrate the lyrics: she responds to the structure of the songs, visually extending their silences, repetitions, and interruptions, so that word, music, and painting come to share a single dramaturgical construction.

By bringing together different moments in Tatiana Blass’s practice, Contrarregra affirms painting as an event, not a stable image. As in theater, what is seen also depends on what remains offstage: time, matter, and the relations that keep acting long after the image appears.

 

Ana Roman and Lahayda Mamani Poma

Curators

• Wings

 

Throughout the twentieth century, directors and playwrights stripped the word of its monopoly over theatrical experience, giving light, body, space, and duration equal weight in shaping the performance. Theorist Hans-Thies Lehmann named this shift postdramatic theater: not the end of dramaturgy, but its redistribution, since narrative loses its exclusivity, and the stage comes to be shaped by the interplay of multiple presences and temporalities.

This shift in theater helps us think about Tatiana Blass’s work, even though her practice belongs to the visual arts: just as the theatrical stage ceased to be confined to the word alone, Blass’s painting ceases to be confined to the canvas alone and expands into other territories. Since the early 2000s, painting has stood at the center of her research, though never closed in on itself. Over nearly three decades, it has unfolded into sculpture, installation, video, writing, and performance, never losing its grip on her thinking—a way of organizing space, light, and color.

Perhaps that’s why her exhibitions leave such a distinctive impression: they are less concerned with bringing together autonomous objects than with offering situations, each work assembling a system of relations that only comes together in the presence of the visitor. The image pulls away from what stands physically before the eyes and turns instead toward experience: the body in motion, the memory of a gesture, the expectation of an event that never fully comes to pass. Each work produces the conditions for an image to occur.

This principle runs through the artist’s entire trajectory, though it takes different forms each time: in the paintings, the narrative seems to break off before it reaches a resolution; in the sculptures, form never fully coincides with itself; in the installations, space takes part in the composition as just another active element; in the writing, words function as images, not as descriptions of them. What concerns the artist, in each case, is not the stability of forms, but their openness to transformation—an instability that isn’t meant to evoke the contemporary world, nor to celebrate process for its own sake, but instead speaks to the very status of the image. In Blass’s work, an image is always a provisional relation between elements that keep acting on one another, never a definitive state: to see it is to find a momentary balance within a field in motion.

Here, her dialogues with playwright Samuel Beckett and choreographer Pina Bausch take on meaning—two figures who, from distinct fields, shifted the center of the stage away from action and toward the relations between time, body, space, and repetition. Beckett dismantles traditional dramatic structure in plays such as Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1957), and Happy Days (1961): rather than organizing the narrative around conflict and resolution, he makes waiting, repetition, and temporal suspension the engines of the theatrical experience, so that the action lingers, returns, breaks off, producing a dilated perception of time. Pina Bausch, at the helm of Tanztheater Wuppertal, arrives at a similar effect through dance: in Café Müller (1978), Kontakthof (1978), and Nelken (1982), she replaces linear narrative with a composition of fragments, everyday gestures, and small actions that reappear in variation, allowing meaning to emerge from juxtaposition and insistence rather than from dramatic progression.

The connection with Blass is not one of direct influence, nor of formal resemblance. It is the same understanding of the stage as a field of relations, in which meaning no longer depends on narrative. Her image, too, rarely presents itself as a finished form: it takes shape through the way materials behave and the tension between the elements at play.

This logic also reorganizes narrative within Blass’s work: her paintings do not represent events, but rather organize the circumstances for something to emerge. The image arises from the encounter with the viewer, rather than preceding it. The audience no longer deciphers a ready-made meaning; instead, it becomes part of the time the work still needs to complete itself.

This is precisely where the title gains its force. Contrarregra [Stage Crew] refers to the figure who, in theater, organizes the stage without ever occupying it: positioning objects, regulating entrances, sustaining the performance from behind it. Blass seems to work from that same place. Less interested in the image as a result than in the operations that make it possible, she exposes what usually stays hidden backstage in a work: not the finished form, but the relations that keep it alive.

 

1. Stage

 

If the wings are the place where the scene is prepared, the stage is where it finally becomes visible. In Contrarregra, however, that visibility is never complete. Tatiana Blass’s works do not present completed events, but rather suspended situations, as if something were about to happen or had just occurred. The scene remains open, built from relations that never fully stabilize.

Human presence threads through much of the artist’s painting, but it rarely takes the form of figuration in the strict sense. More than characters, the bodies function as markers of presence, references that make the scale of space and the duration of the scene perceptible. In some paintings they appear seated, almost always accompanied by chairs, caught in a waiting that never resolves into action. In others, they are reduced to small figures set against the vastness of the landscape. In others still, their contours blur into the surroundings, as if body and space shared a single pictorial matter, or took on an almost ghostly presence, suspended between appearance and disappearance.

Landscape takes center stage in this construction. Mountains, rock walls, and vast stretches of land stop functioning as backdrop and move into the foreground, at a scale that often exceeds the human body. Without amounting to a representation of Minas Gerais, these images engage with a recurring experience of its landscapes, where geology seems to impose its own sense of time: the earth is never just surface; it is matter shot through with layers, fissures, cuts, and cavities that suggest invisible depths. Before them, the human figure becomes merely a provisional measure. 

“I like to think of painting as an open-ended narrative, one in which an entire story is being created right there,” says Tatiana Blass. In her paintings, actions unfold in an indeterminate time, as if caught simultaneously at the beginning, the middle, and the end—the narrative never reaches completion; it stays suspended in waiting. It is a logic close to that of the tableau vivant (living picture), a stage technique especially widespread in the nineteenth century, in which actors stood motionless on stage, composing living images that suspend action without breaking its narrative tension.

This suspension extends into the very matter of the painting. Although she uses pink, blue, yellow, orange, and other colors, Blass rarely works them at full saturation: they are muted tones, shot through with grays and earth tones that seem to strip them of any purity. Forms lose fixed contours, and people, objects, landscapes, and architecture dissolve slowly into one another, within a single atmosphere. Melting is already happening there, before any physical transformation takes hold: not as an effect, but as a principle that keeps the image from ever settling.

This investigation continues in the paintings on glass, where the very condition of the image’s appearance becomes part of the work. In Contraluz [Backlight] (2026), the transparency of the support pulls architecture, light, and the visitor’s movement into the painting itself, so that what were once external elements become part of the work—continually reorganized as the conditions of the scene change.

Developed especially for Contrarregra, the new works turn their gaze toward what usually remains invisible, but sustains the exhibition itself. Among them is Contraluz #2 [Backlight #2] (2026), based on an image of the working spaces of Instituto Tomie Ohtake: by bringing this private environment into the exhibition, Blass folds the backstage into the work itself, drawing the museum’s inner workings closer to the logic of the stage crew.

In her work, temporality becomes inseparable from matter. The melting of the paintings begins with a scripted gesture, but its unfolding escapes the artist’s control. Heat and gravity act directly on form, which keeps changing, with no final state to reach and no ideal image to preserve. Visitors do not find a finished work; they follow successive states of an ongoing process, and duration becomes part of the piece’s very structure, not merely the time spent viewing it. What is revealed is not what the work is, but what it is becoming.

This is the sense in which the title Contrarregra takes shape: the artist doesn’t steer attention directly to the main event; she lingers instead on what precedes it, what accompanies it, what keeps acting after it seems to have ended, stepping back from center stage. The work stops being a point of arrival and becomes the very space in which something keeps happening.

 

III. Dramaturgy

 

Sheath the knife of words

Sheath the blade you drew

And cut nearly all

And cut nearly nil

Nearly everything you spewed

 

Kiko Dinucci, “Faca da palavra” [Knife of Words]

 

The dramaturgy of Contrarregra is organized around what remains incomplete. In “Faca da palavra” [Knife of Words], a track from Kiko Dinucci’s album Medusa (2026), language appears fragmented, built from cuts, repetitions, and words that seem to break off before reaching a definitive meaning. The “nearly” that recurs throughout the song shifts attention away from what is actually said and toward what remains suspended.

Part of the new works brought together in this exhibition grew out of the encounter between Tatiana Blass and musician Kiko Dinucci, who, after seeing the artist’s recent paintings, wanted to collaborate with her—a partnership that led to the cover art for his new record and, later, to a series of works based on its songs and on the album itself. The paintings on view in Contrarregra respond directly to that invitation, setting up a dialogue between music and image without attempting a literal translation of the lyrics. Instead, they extend the atmosphere of the songs into visual form, turning the exhibition into a space where painting, word, and music come together in a single dramaturgical construction.

The word recurs throughout Blass’s practice, not as a complement to image but as one material among others. In Contra-argumento [Counterargument] (2026), it ceases to function merely as language, taking on image and duration. More than meaning, what interests the artist is the word’s trajectory—what remains between utterance and listening, between what is said and what actually arrives.

This investigation also extends to her relationship with sound. In Metade da fala no chão [Half the Speech on the Floor], a series begun in 2008, musical instruments have their function interrupted. In Piano surdo [Deaf Piano], shown at the 29th São Paulo Biennial, and in the drum kit featured in Contrarregra, sound remains only as a possibility. The instruments stay present, recognizable, carrying with them the memory of music, but refuse their usual function. Silence is not absence; it is a sound that remains inscribed in matter, a music that stays latent, though it is never heard.

At the entrance to the Institute stands Nó (Unifila) #2 [Knot (Queue Manager) #2] (2022), a sculpture occupying the passageway that gives visitors their first physical contact with the work. The metal structure twists in on itself, taking the shape of a knot. There’s also a sense of melting to the gesture, so the piece shifts between rigidity, flexibility, and movement in an object meant to suggest stability—an experience where the materials keep defying their own properties and expectations.

In Quebra-quebra [Breakage] (2023–2026), this same procedure shifts to everyday objects. The ceramic pieces stay recognizable, but no longer fully match the functions they were made for. Word, instrument, and object all stay present, though set apart from what is normally expected of them. The dramaturgy isn’t organized around completed action, but around the persistence of expectation.

Throughout the exhibition, Tatiana Blass treats dramaturgy as an arrangement of intervals. Rather than driving the narrative toward a resolution, her works keep the relationships among word, image, matter, and sound in flux, refusing to grant any single element lasting stability. Contrarregra shifts attention from what presents itself as an event to the conditions that make it possible, turning waiting, transformation, and latency into the very site of experience.

 

Ana Roman and Lahayda Mamani Poma

Curators

First bell. The curtains are closed. In the audience, a few late footsteps, throat-clearing, whispers, and creaking seats. Second bell. The lights start to go down. Little by little, the noise fades, voices die down, bodies grow still. The third bell echoes. The curtains slowly part. Gazes, once scattered, converge on a single point. There is a suspension: as if life could stop for a few moments so that, at last, theater could begin.

On stage, one actor sits in a chair. In one hand, he holds a glass of water. In the other, a sharp knife. In the darkness cut by the spotlight falling from the ceiling, the blade throws back a small flash of light. On stage, three women stand in a row, next to each other, facing the audience. Light hits their faces. They sing while a piece of cloth floats above their heads, hanging from the ceiling. A scream cuts through the air. On the empty stage, closer and closer footsteps are heard. Faint whispers at the back of the scene. A lamp turns on, and a woman crosses the stage carrying a suitcase.

No matter the play, on stage, silence, sound, light, every gesture and object belongs to the scene. Everything, down to the smallest tremor, feels inevitable or spontaneous, as if happening for the first time right then. But by the time the curtains open, the theater has long since started. Nothing betrays the machine that holds up the scene. Behind the scenes, a factory of coincidences produces that which, to the viewer, looks like chance.

A set moves without being seen. A glass of water is already on the table before anyone feels thirsty. A letter already waits in the drawer before the character decides to open it. A chair is already placed exactly where a body will fall. A coat finds the actor before he even looks for it. A piano is already tuned before its notes ring out. A knife already rests in its sheath before the final blow. All these “alreadies,” invisible to the audience, make up the theater that happens before and during the show.

A kind of silent, unwritten stage direction. Without applause or spotlights, hands move on and off the stage so that what we call “Theater” can light up in front of the audience. Dust rises among fast footsteps, scaffolding, and ladders. Cloths, ropes, wood, and cables are dragged across the floor. Distances measured and marked with tape. Clocks time entrances and exits. Planned paths, practiced timing, gestures repeated again and again. The main character in this scene has no lines—a ghost conductor, working backstage so that everything happens just as it should.

This character moves everything that must not be seen. They work against the flow of the show, holding up the hidden side of theater’s visible action: they come before and stay with the action on stage. They pull cables tight, fold cloth, collect glasses, swap one sword for another, put a book back on the shelf before anyone notices it was gone. They work in the space between seconds. A five-second delay can throw off the whole rhythm of a scene. If something goes out of place, or if “chance” fails to happen, everything falls apart.

In the dictionary, this person is defined as the contrarregra—the Portuguese term for a stage manager, literally, “counter-rule”: the technician or professional responsible for running the stage. Their job is to oversee how a play unfolds, taking care of the movable set pieces and other elements of the scene, the actors’ entrances and exits, and the timing of countless cues and sounds that make a play happen. The definition is precise, but not enough.

If the prefix “counter” suggests opposition, the contrarregra, ironically, acts in favor of the rule. Their job is to make sure it is followed. They are not the anti-rule, but the reason the rule can exist. They don’t break it; instead, they set up the game board and work out the path of every object, staying one step ahead of error. They hold up the invisible order of the scene, making sure everything happens at the right time, that objects show up when they should, that the machinery behind the show keeps running. The more perfect their performance, the fewer traces they leave. By erasing the marks of their own work, the way events are arranged becomes imperceptible, and everything flows.

Nastassja Martin discusses, in East of Dreaming (2023), the figure of the trickster: a shape-shifting mythological presence known for causing disorder, trouble, and unexpected turns by breaking rules or playing tricks, whether foolish or clever. One example she gives is a small mammal called the sable, native to the Kamchátka Peninsula in the far east of Russia. To throw off its predators, the sable scrambles its own tracks, making countless paths on the ground that zigzag, leap, and spiral in different directions. This leaves the animals chasing it lost, not knowing which way to go, going in circles, trying to rebuild a path that no longer exists. The sable’s tracks scramble what looks real: strangely, they are a way of appearing by disappearing. By producing false clues—or really, by producing their own absence—they become impossible to catch. Where capture is expected, there is an escape; where a body is expected, there is absence.

The trickster, then, shuffles the cards of the game: an unclear, destabilizing force moving through the thresholds of the world. It doesn’t follow the rule—it defies it. It is unpredictable, lives in chaos, shaking up the logic everyone believes in and causing detours and tricks. This makes me think that maybe the contrarregra is the trickster’s opposite image: two in-between figures who live at the edges of the scene—one to destabilize order, the other to make it possible. The sable, like a trickster, scrambles its own tracks so its predator will lose the trail; the contrarregra, on the other hand, erases its own tracks so no one notices it was there. In this way, both stay hidden, but to create opposite effects. If one creates confusion so no one can catch it, the other creates a smooth flow so no one notices it was ever there.

Even though they create completely different effects, their sense of time matches: neither is ever in the same time as the one who watches. They live in another present, always a few minutes ahead or behind. They move against the beat of the landscape, acting in an unclear zone—the instant that almost can’t be noticed, between seeing and acting. In the case of the contrarregra, it is where the theater has not yet begun, or exactly where it has already ended; in the case of the trickster, it comes before meaning, confusing what we see by refusing to be caught.

Let’s imagine the contrarregra acting like a trickster. What orchestration would happen behind the curtains? What would be the line between the stage and the life that comes before and holds up the scene?

The third bell echoes.

The curtains slowly part. Now, the contrarregra does not disappear behind them. They stay on stage with all the “alreadies” that make up its actions. Their gesture offers itself to view, it becomes image. Scaffolding, cables, lights, and operations that stay on the hidden side of the show become present. The ghostly shape of its action becomes solid and thick. In the space between life and theater, the painting’s duration scrambles representation. Disappearance becomes visible. In the silence, the sounds of the painting’s machinery layer over the landscape, like ghosts blurred into brushstrokes and color. From deep in the composition, a dance of hands and gestures then comes out. There is a suspension: as if theater could stop for a few moments so that, at last, its shadow could become visible, shapeless, and alive.

Just beyond the stage screen, the viewer is drawn to move through shaky ground made of tracks and things. And then, in this planned chance, we can catch a glimpse of the silent sound of the world waiting for us.

 

Julia Pedreira

Assum Preto [blackbird], my song
Is as sad as yours
They also stole my love
Who was the light, ah, of my eyes

Luiz Gonzaga and Humberto Teixeira, “Assum preto”

 

During the production of some of the works presented in the exhibition Contrarregra [Stage Crew], I had the privilege of following Tatiana Blass’s creative process, and I observed the ease with which the artist moves from a painting to a sculpture, back to a painting made on glass, edits a video about another encaustic painting—which melts with heat—and then returns to a fourth or fifth painting. In the artist’s hands, the handling of distinct materialities happens at the level of substances rather than media, straining the temporality of the materials. The accumulation of memory, content, and embodiment is cyclical. Blass places absence and presence, removing and adding—whether of physical or poetic matter—on equal footing, unseating the traditional dependence between form and content, which is resolved either by applying a theme to a system of production (illustrating) or by creating a system capable of absorbing any theme (co-opting).

Her creative process is not about assembling, planning, or piling up meanings in service of a narrative, idea, or concept. The artist does not lead us toward a situation that evokes a cultural origin, nor toward using the positionality of materials as the cause of a poetic function. Blass seems guided by the presentation of contradictions. On one hand, she accepts that everything she produces is a projection of the idealization of time; on the other, she refuses to take control of that projection, since her intuition is not affected by the fixity of matter: after all, there is no need to aestheticize the time of materials. This stance generates a certain subversion of ways of making, since what reverberates from the work is neither a response to the productive system nor its resolution. Even though the works take part in that system, her creations do not acquire rhetoric: they are, rather, a counterpart to our relationship with Western time—which, in contemporary times, is relentless in shaping aesthetic values—one in which the works themselves carry less resonance than the machinery of validation.

The origin of Blass’s creative process does not point directly to an artistic identity, to a continuous return to any kind of self-referentiality, or to a sense of belonging to issues shaped over the course of her career. The artist’s movement is resilient and adaptive: the further she moves from what she identifies with, the more she reveals the drive and the need for identification. This diagnosis becomes unavoidable when engaging with the works on view here. Blass sustains a tension: she does not return to a core to celebrate an increasingly refined identity, nor does she glorify the rupture of her sense of belonging. Her main poetic codes gesture toward a philosophical dimension. There is no narrative: the work moves away from storytelling, unsettles any concept, and gives shape to the essence of the contrast between the precise and the imprecise. Yet the return to, or rupture with, identity is what keeps the cycle of productivity going in the contemporary world. Oscillating between saturation and osmosis is a dialogue about the passage of time within our lives. In Blass’s work, time is suspended, blocking our view of any conclusion—the ethical imposition of a time that refines and passes judgment on solutions meant for other times. Whether it is the past guiding the present, or the present destroyed to reach a future project, everything becomes a race to keep anything from being contaminated by calculation, by the score that dictates what to say about everyday life.

When something melts in Blass’s work, what vanishes is the matter that turns the dramas of our everyday lives into a theme. If there is theater here, it is not about our dramas, but about the disappearance and appearance of that dramatization. In 2010, the artist presented, at the 29th São Paulo Biennial, the work Metade da fala no chão – Piano surdo [Half of the Speech on the Ground—Deaf Piano], performed live by a pianist playing five “Nocturnes” by Frédéric Chopin, and by two people pouring hot, liquid paraffin wax into the grand piano. As more wax was poured, gradually hardening, the pianist found it increasingly difficult to perform the pieces, until the keys stopped working altogether and it was no longer possible to play. The artist thus creates a space for the impossibility of theater itself—emptiness, invisibility, illegibility, and isolation, opposition to something, or the void between things—a space that complements the very idea of presence, which appears only because everything else is absent. The absence of what has ended, of what is no longer there, of what is waiting, becomes the very solidification of presence and represents our binary relationship with time: clock time, which dictates our tasks, and the time of our rituals for escaping counted time. What remains is the assertion that nothing can be totalitarian or universal, since, as a cultural condition, things must be used according to the order of different times. Yet the impossibility of interpretation is the argument for acting, one that denies the abstract while also denying the practice of naming things.

The paintings follow the same rules the artist sets, especially the most recent ones. The figures do not communicate, are not defined, have no identity—only a suggestion of gender. They merge with objects, with architecture. If they do something, like carrying a chair or raising a hand, they do not do it in relation to another figure, nor to the chair, nor to the gesture. They are there because nothing else can be there, because they affirm a disorientation toward a space that is not defined. If art appears across cultures as an artificialization and mirroring of the ontological nature of things, those things need to be articulated and identified within the game of representation. The figures come close to the logic of pictographs, but do not point to any function or sentimental value. If they convey anything, it is through some kind of visual writing, some kind of visual insight: there are measures that form gestural rhythms between colors and shapes; suggestions of volume built through modeling and modulation, impasto and glazing. But all of this materializes outside the norm of learning or the refinement of a skill. 

The painting of a wild boar dating back 45,500 years, found in the Leang Tedongnge Cave, in Indonesia, shows us humanity’s capacity to produce an image with high descriptive value and realistic proportions. This supports the idea that Tatiana Blass’s work affirms art’s value simply through art’s existence—not in a formalist sense, but as a kind of truth specific to our society. Cognitive development is a consequence of the capacity to connect; it is not simply the introspection of learning models that structure themselves in response to the environment, offering us information about expertise in the visualities and temporalities of recent history. Connection stands opposed to a logic of accumulation. Blass’s work does not offer us another skillful, subjective view of our time, but a deeper layer, one that speaks to the capacity and incapacity for connection, affirming enaction as a fundamental principle for understanding life. In her recent work, the artist paints lights emerging from spotlights, the same spotlights that melt her sculptures and paintings. What emerges is a sense similar to sunlight—ethereal, untouchable, untamable—dissolving and bathing the spatialization of matter that might otherwise fix a counted time. Isn’t that what a work of art is—the fixing of a time within a space that triggers meanings?

Western science drew a line between culture and the state of “pure nature.” Things simply are, without any indication of absence or presence. At some point, the individual manipulates things, idealizing a separation between extensive time and intensive time. Blass’s work reminds us that we do not need to pierce a bird’s eyes to make it sing more, as Luiz Gonzaga already warned us. Our song, like the bird’s, can exist without penalty or guilt for creating culture, but in sync with nature. Singing is also a condition outside the cultural filter: we sing because, like birds, we are nature.

 

Manuel Carvalho

The ants shift the granite

dulled by the polish of the diamond brush

a painful touch upon the hanging plain

tilted by the motion of the restless specks

without focus, escape path or line ahead

 

Were it not black

the granite would know

the restive face is not its own

.

 

The restive face belongs to you

pretending the water is the maker of waves

and not the wind that stirs it

Or the stone,

seemingly ordered and whole

yet built from wild matter

Like the asymmetric pattern of glass

neither liquid nor solid

an imbalance that holds its own coherence

and lets the light through

weary of its confusion

and of knowing nothing is ever still

nothing is even slowly still

Perhaps all there is are shades of unrest

.

 

Perhaps all there is are shades of rest

 

The rainbow gives order to speed

and appears to remind us that it is not there

.

 

There it is

the cat’s claw

the fish’s gill

the brain’s corpus callosum

Tiny proofs

that evolution has no aim

 

The son says:

lava is wet fire

.

 

Lava is dry fire

A cradle of photons in the glass bulb

The lamp lays the shadow down

.

 

The eyelid turns off the light

the child lays the bear down

the grass lays the green down

 

The fire glows bluer

the honey itches the cough

the wall blocks the signal

the solvent erases the grease

anger recalls anger

 

The sleep that cannot sleep

is worse than a bad dream

it does not put the pain away

it only drags it along

into the next day

.

 

The next night

sets the alarm on the digital clock

The lower horizontal stroke

of the final seconds digit

appeared sealed with black-clotted blood

The keloid did not disturb the mechanism

but leaves a doubt

.

 

It is clear now

the sun strikes

the rug holds the floor

the ground is gone

the ants stay still

.

 

 Tatiana Blass

What Was It (Kiko Dinucci/Romulo Fróes)

 

What was it

That brought us this far?

All the ways we’d just begun

Rushing to nowhere

Even then

I still tried

Never knowing where we strayed

Searching for us in someone else

For nothing ever went away

 

As I watched the sky

In the sun I saw

Your eyes shining over me

Till our tears ran free

Love came down, a pouring rain

The Carnaval we’d lost again

Every scar we ever wore

Couldn’t hurt anymore

 

What was it

That bound us to this end?

All the ways we’d just moved on

And reaped only regrets

Even then

I still tried

Borrowed love just to forget

Pretending though I know I never was

As you made me happy in every way

 

As I watched the sky

In the sun I saw

Your eyes shining over me

Till our tears ran free

Love came down, a pouring rain

The Carnaval we’d lost again

Every scar we ever wore

Couldn’t hurt anymore

 

Stray Dog (Kiko Dinucci / quote: “Qasida,” by Siba Veloso)

 

Running through this endless city

Where every street is just the same

Every corner leads me further

With no shelter, peace, or place

I blow through every red light

Cause I never break my pace

 

Roaming like a stray dog

Roaming like a stray dog

Roaming like a stray dog

Roaming like a stray dog

 

The more I chase

The farther I fall

Far from my safe haven

Cast out in the cold

Caught in the rain

Haunted by hunger

Nowhere to belong 

No mercy from men

 

Roaming like a stray dog

Roaming like a stray dog

Roaming like a stray dog

Roaming like a stray dog

 

You are my shelter

I knew all along

I run these streets for you 

Put on my collar

Come take me home

 

Stinger (Kiko Dinucci/Sophia Chablau)

 

Can’t tell if I love you

But I ache to become you

Fucking you I turn human

 

Eyes locked on yours

You’re still a stranger

Break my chest open

Choke me for good

Take my breath away

 

I hate myself

I love you

I don’t know you

I hate you

 

Your face, your scent

A ghost in my head

You won’t fade away

I want it again

Castle in ruins

Sonic Youth

Confusion Is Sex

 

I hate you

I hate you

I hate you

I hate you

Stinger

Fireworm

You set me on fire

You make me ill

You tear me down

Still I endure

Still I endure

I hate you

I hate you

I hate you

Still I endure

I hate you

You tear me down

Stinger

You make me ill

Still I endure

Come home

 

Knife of Words (Kiko Dinucci)

 

Sheath the knife of words

Sheath the blade you drew

And cut nearly all

And cut nearly nil

Nearly everything you spewed

 

And in the dead of night

Eyes on the ceiling, trying to sleep

All at once

A sudden fear

Dreaming I fall, I disappear

 

Nearly all

Nearly nil

Nearly everything you hewed 

Sheath the knife of words

Sheath the blade you drew

 

At the break of dawn

As I finally fall asleep

The city wide awake

Its downfall starts to creep

 

Sheath the knife of words

Sheath the knife of words

 

Shellbound (Kiko Dinucci/Maria Beraldo)

 

Come out of your armor and lie in my bed

Brush your lioness’ claw against me

Flower Snail

Bring your shadow to watch us from the dark

As we become one

Lay the weapon by the bedside

Watch your face shift

As though changing masks

You crawl out of your shell

Woolly caterpillar

I’ve never seen you this close

Those sad eyes of yours

But my body still knows you

Cross the bridge, the sun breaks through

Orange clouds, a scratch upon my chest

Flower Snail

You rip through the city with the roar of your steel

Silence that kills

As the evening falls the wind rises

And turns the weather

To tropical storm

As I dream from home

Woolly caterpillar

I’ve never seen you this close

Those sad eyes of yours

But my body still knows you

 

Within you lives the whole wild

Paw-paw-raw