David Barro /// Drawing the Horizon Line with Scissors

There is an image that seems particularly tense to me. A half-open door finds Matisse in his studio, sitting and looking down. The photograph, taken by Brassaï, does not allow one to see the object of his gaze. In the studio, ordered by a filtered light, dominates a large bunch of flowers that reinforces the serenity that the artist defended in his writings. Matisse thinks paintings from the inner gaze.

I am taking this gesture as a starting point because it is difficult not to think of Matisse when I come across many of Tatiana Blass’s works. Not in a formal sense, but in that which he termed “drawing with scissors”, and which supposed an aesthetic revolution for his time. After all, in Tatiana Blass’s works the cut and the outline are always present, whether as a fissure, mutilation, erasing, parenthesis, discordance, concordance, absence, distance, discontinuity, breath, occultation, emptiness, trick or collage. A cutting that is at the same time radical and smooth, veiled. As if it were a product of Photoshop. Like Matisse, instead of drawing shapes and/or outlines of shapes in order to fill them with colour, Tatiana draws and composes directly over that colour, taking advantages of the textures, which take on as much importance as the shapes.