Titania Seidl

Paintings make friends.

There must be at least two entities for a painting to exist. One is human and names it as such and the other an object (external) that requests attention and a gaze that brings us to the problematics of painting; or that through these problems contain or express a family of forces that host themes, ideas, sensations, etc.  To be celebrated as a painting that human needs to share the experience with another. That could be the bird that in the Greek story hits the painted grapes with its beak or another viewer. The third force is someone who shares an experience with us, a certain time under the same circumstances.

For us humans, a painting is at first, a flat surface with bituminous materials applied on it.

Although in different sizes it mostly stands as orthogonal, possibly, due to the oppression of rational on our everyday life. It also happens that most parts of the paintings are presented on white walls or so-called white cubes. Still painting can offer us a third, fourth, and even fifth dimension.

It’s the third entity – a person who visits the exhibition, that brings the world from outside and territorializes the painting, creating associations between what he sees and past, present or future events (desired or dreamt).

With a very fast gaze, like scrolling down or smartphones with our fingers, all paintings are equal, rectangular, probably adjusted to the size of our screen.

A more attentive look, bring qualities that highlight a painting and make it unique.

Painting, brings two or more people together, forming a community by the desire, or experience of gasping the future – a painting is a potential artwork that only becomes when in contact with the viewer. It’s an event, or a platform for that event to happen in the mind and body of the viewer. The community that exists between two people in front of it can host differences among them (political, gender, racial, social, economic, etc).

One day I went to visit an exhibition in a small space in Vienna called “White Dwarf”. As the name potentially states, it’s a small space, and white. This space is very high but not bigger than five square meters, and one must close the metal door with a huge glass in order to have space to be with the work.

Titania Seidl’s work was huge, bigger than I ever thought and it raised up a sort of religious feeling  in us. That religious aura was reinforced by the sky, made as autonomous and gestural form, that served as background for a white draping that felt like a sculpture suspended in time and space.

When I’ve closed the door to better observe the work, I have reinforced the sense of community, by offering a special time to the work. That sense of community was created as much by the way the painting was installed in that space as by the elastic qualities of it, capable of embracing all our projections.

This is easier or more natural on a work that, in its materiality, antagonizes language, going beyond the need to fully comprehend and domesticate the work. Painting stays always at bay, laying between the brain and the stomach.

Painting stays always at bay, between the stomach and the brain. It requires senses and through senses, organizes thoughts or projects new forms of looking and feeling about the world out there, producing new epistemic systems, and by this, new ideas.

In Seidl’s paintings, small reliefs condition what we are looking at. These forms are not binary contradictions, like those celebrated in Art History – like Boxing and female sensuality in David Salle’s works. These two forces – the painted and the relief, help each other to bring us to a complex network of senses that is interior. Seidl’s paintings are vehicles for intimacy, showing with great comfort and sincere feelings, small desires and interior stimulations.

The community that Seidl offers us is, by this, full and generous. It’s very seductive by the colour pallet and its forms and non-forms, allowing us always a way to get in, with our body or intellect.

Hugo Canoilas, 2019

Footnote 1: In the history of painting there’s an episode that relates to a greek painter  that has painted a young man with some grapes.  One brid approached this painting and hit the painted grapes with its beak. The painter , thought then , of improving the human figure. A second bird  run away  when , approaching the painting recognize the young man. After a third intervention in the painting a third bird approached the painting and stayed, observing  it. This story that I recall here from memory gave birth to the „Order of the Third Bird“ that has been developing transcendental forms of attention and observation attentive . More in www.estarser.net .

Footnote 2: The name is borrowed from Ernesto de Sousa „Artes gráficas , veículo  de intimidade“; Ed. Inova, 1985, Porto.