Titania Seidl at Quadrado Azul Lisbon, May 2024
As the most intimate details of our lives get commodified, it comes as no surprise that sleep has recently entered into our common focus. The quality of our sleep - to be measured by devices snugly fitted to our skin, almost like good luck charms; to be enhanced by pills, sprays, diets, meditation and silk wraparound sleep masks - has become a luxury asset. And yet, inevitably, we still lose control of our bodies and minds while we drift off. While our bodies autofunctions take over, we lose disbelief of our brain’s autofictions, and more often than not, we would prefer to stay in this passivity a little bit longer rather than submitting to the waking beeps of our alarms.
Titania Seidl’s paintings at Quadrado Azul Lisbon address the moment between sleep and waking, consciousness and dream. The exhibition is structured by the painter’s most recent series, combining text, loose watercolor paintings and meticulously sharp sections of oil paint. Familiar images twist and become obscured, text fades in and out of legibility. The differing scale of the paintings - both human-sized and page-sized - demand an active movement through the space by the viewer; the differing depicted images - gleaned from both contemporary and historical sources - demand attention and the ability to sink into what is perceived.
Titania Seidl lives in Vienna, where she works as a painter, writer and co-directs the exhibition project MAUVE. She is a recipient of the 2023 Austrian State Scholarship for Fine Arts and will be part of the Artist in Residence program at CCA Andratx later in 2024.
