In 1948, close to the inauguration of a large exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Henri Matisse, in a letter to Henry Clifford – director of the institution at the time – expressed  his  worries  about  the  hypothetic  lack  of  difficulties  in  his  painting:  “I  have always tried to conceal my efforts. I have always wanted my works  to  exude  the lightness and joy of spring, which never let us suspect the amount of work it takes. For this reason, I fear that the young people, as seeing in my works only an apparent easiness and negligence in the drawing, would use this as an excuse to avoid certain efforts that seem necessary to me.”

If we could have included Tatiana Blass among these youngsters, the apprehension of the master would have been in vain. Her paintings, in spite of their freshness and delicateness, are endowed with a formal rigor that evidences the effort they demand. On her part, there is no attempt to use shortcuts or to reach spring without previously going through the harshness of winter. The various superimposed layers of paint never dissimulate the artist’s effort, even if the result has the general appearance of a landscape whose  chromatic contrasts are appeased, and this turns to be true even for the brighter colors. Her efforts tend to accommodate and quiet as possible diverse color masses, i.e., to find intuitively a certain chromatic agreement to structure the work. And this strenuous task  is achieved just as her work gains density.

Although painting is something omnipresent in the artist’s trajectory (besides, in her recent paintings, the tonal relations are more appraised and decreasingly depend on the neutral ground that the white color tended to become), new experiences, especially three- dimensional works, have been interesting her lately. Páreo [Running match] — a marble sculpture in which four life-size horse’s legs climb down the stairway at the Paço das  Artes — is reminiscent, as many of her paintings, of a landscape. But there is only an index of the animal, for a sort of horizon line eliminates the larger part of its body. Thus, more than inferring the horse’s back, it is up to the visitor to complete the surroundings and to relate the work with the place where it is located.

The operation effected in Espartilho [Corset] is a distinct one, for instead of sectioning  the landscape, there is a sort of challenge to the law of gravity. It consists of  four platforms of different thicknesses and heights supported by wooden structures that elevate the branches of a guava tree in the median of Avenida da Universidade. More than alluding or representing a landscape, the artist interferes directly in the nature. The “ground” onto which the work can be perceived is Cidade Universitária [University Compound] itself, but this perception would only occur if the work had not be disguised among the trees to avoid direct assailment. The structure that now supports the tree crown — as the girdle compressing the abdomen and the waist of women to give them a slimmer look — should not be evident and so the green paint camouflages it. But now the guava tree, according to a certain standard — which might not be predominant in our times, neither usual for a tree — certainly looks more elegant. Nonetheless, the elegance of this work diverges from the Photoshop techniques or the liposuctions, so common nowadays. It’s the lofty elegance of a given moment that tries to temporarily model nature instead of pruning it. And therefore, this might be an outmoded beauty, or better, one that refuses to be always fashionable.

Thus, if on one hand Tatiana Blass’ project conceals the difficulties of its facture, it also allows us to broaden Matisse’s misgiving: even if it doesn’t exactly bring on the joy of spring, the work is uncompromising and also requires a certain effort from the public.