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.