VITRINE _ ALGODÃO: Doll without rest
Individual exhibition – Tatiana Blass
Exhibition composed of about twenty unpublished works, amongst them gouache paintings on raw cotton canvas, on glass and on paper; two interventions in the gallery space; and three videos made in 2016.
The spatial situation of the Celma Albuquerque Galeria de Arte, with the glass façade totally transparent to the passer of the commercial street in which it is located, as a great showcase, led Tatiana Blass to produce the works exhibited.
Continuing her research on the pictorial space as a dramatic space, her paintings of the last years address scenes of plays in which the figures of actors are absorbed by the surrounding space. The shapes and colors do not determine an outline, they are ambiguous. The scenery-environment can be seen as a costume that dresses the scene, confusing what is ahead and what is behind, becoming a single pictorial body built as a print.
The supports of the paintings, cotton and glass, led to the mounting of the exhibition into two groups: “Theater – Showcase”, with scenes from store windows in which customers and passers-by get confused with the mannequins; and “Theater – Cotton”, made from scenes of plays in which the scenarios are domestic interiors. In both series, human figures are portrayed as people-actors-puppets in a theater, paralyzed in their roles as surface in a dress.
Two interventions were made in the gallery space: a pair of women’s shoes embedded in the cement floor, so that it is still possible to wear them; and in the window, a couple of mannequins made out of wax and dressed in social clothes. The heat of the light from the reflectors on the mannequin’s bodies makes them melt and their clothes fall slowly during the entire period of the exhibition.
In addition to that, Blass will also present three videos from the series “Desprofissão” (2016), with the same duration (3’30 ”) and displayed as paintings on a framed monitor. In all of them, a professional performs his activity in reverse. The car washer becomes an “unwasher”, as he washes the car with dirty clay water; the manicure becomes a “dismanicure”, who paints the client’s entire hand, except for her nails; and the graffiti artist paints over the existing graffiti with spray in the same color as the wall, “ungraphitting” them.