2019.06.15—
Titania Seidl


Opening: 15 June, 6 pm


Titania Seidl (1988, Vienna) is the second artist invited to develop an intervention on the walls of The Grotto. The mural paintings in the grotto are overlapping and juxtaposing, in a collective process of appropriation and erasure, creating community among all the participants.


Titania Seidl's paintings have a diagrammatic quality, by the way they accumulate various types of input (from the personal to art, social, political and history). Her recent works have curtains that become sculptural elements suspended in the sky. Their original motifs were fabrics painted in the Baroque period, which covered the nudity of women. By empowering these elements, Seidl's painting suspends the quality or functionality of the motif, its time and its gravity, giving to the paintings an emancipatory quality.


Seidl's interventions in some of the grotto’s ceiling niches evoke the painted skies of the Baroque period. These “portions of the sky” break the grotto, in an illusory way, with the projection of the light of our lanterns when they discover the four interventions.


The preparatory watercolors, made by the artist, to these paintings, are abstract and hold areas of color. They form different intensities of color in the relationship between the quantity of watercolor, water, absorption and drying time. This process is made in a horizontal position, in perfect harmony with gravity. In The Grotto, the transposition of these marks to the ceiling is made against gravity, and with acrylic colors and a medium, that helps the paint to occupy the protuberances and reliefs of the walls. What is, naturally, a barrier and an obstacle for painters becomes an agent that transforms the quality of the paintings.


The new color zones in the cave may be understood simply as zones of color or as open skies, but are mainly receptacles for the author's impression on the cave, like a mark of a hand that touches it, in search of a certain type of empathy. The four chosen zones to work upon, activate the space, by giving it areas of intensity and silence which return value to all the marks and textures of the walls that were not intervened.


In addition to the intervention of the artist at The Grotto, we present three recent paintings and one text. The text that the artist has been developing unfolds her internal and micro-narrative concerns reinforcing the intention of her painting as a place of introspection and individuation.

. Titania Seidl, in The Grotto. Quadrado Azul, Lisbon, 2019. Photo by João Ferro Martins. 
. Titania Seidl, in The Grotto. Quadrado Azul, Lisbon, 2019. Photo by João Ferro Martins. 
. Titania Seidl, in The Grotto. Quadrado Azul, Lisbon, 2019. Photo by João Ferro Martins. 
. Titania Seidl, in The Grotto. Quadrado Azul, Lisbon, 2019. Photo by João Ferro Martins. 
. Titania Seidl, in The Grotto. Quadrado Azul, Lisbon, 2019. Photo by João Ferro Martins. 
. Titania Seidl, in The Grotto. Quadrado Azul, Lisbon, 2019. Photo by João Ferro Martins. 
. Titania Seidl, in The Grotto. Quadrado Azul, Lisbon, 2019. Photo by João Ferro Martins. 
. Titania Seidl, in The Grotto. Quadrado Azul, Lisbon, 2019. Photo by João Ferro Martins.