The Painter & the Rectangle (I'm enjoying what's going on, the autobiographical narrative, but the edges are a little too hard for me)
Künstler/in
Titania Seidl
(geb. 1988 in Wien)
Date2016
ClassificationsMalerei
MediumÖl auf Baumwolle
Dimensions160 × 110 cm
Credit LineArtothek des Bundes
Object number28121
DescriptionThe painter & the rectangle is an ongoing series of paintings, currently consisting of nine works in the same format (160 x 110 cm). I started working on this series in the summer of 2016, disregarding my usual small scale for a bit (although I have since continued working on the small formats as well) and trying to bring together / highlight / meditate on some of the aspects that interest me in painting as a medium per se:- process: all of the paintings in the series are almost excessively layered, showing traces of every step of the painting process. By leaving a lot of white space, the accidental marks of their making appear clearly on the canvas, every spill remains visible as a corpus delicti of the creation of painterly tricks on the canvas.
- anecdotes: as the title suggests, I was interested in exploring the relationship between myself - or rather, my role as the producer of artworks - and the finished objects - which, in the end, are objectively no more than rectangles of fabric with different values of color on top. This shows partly in the source material used for the representational elements on the canvases - photos of my own clothing, for example - and partly in the (long) subtitles for the individual paintings. They are in part anecdotal notes I made while working on them, and in part snippets of conversations and crits I had in my studio, talking about the paintings.
- references: as in all of my work, the paintings at hand draw largely from a digital image archive I have built up over the last years. It spans over different art historical periods, different media and genres, and may seem very random at first. However, what connects all the images for me is the search for visual strategies, similarities found in different periods of time and space. For example, a reproduction of a fresco found in the archeological site of Pompeii, a pattern included in an 19th century Japanese book on classic Chinese calligraphy, and yesterday’s iphone photo of someone’s favorite new shirt on Instagram. The internet makes all three equally accessible, but does it also make them equal in quality, or is there a hierarchy between the three? What does „taste“ mean nowadays, is there a contemporary unifier? What is it that we find visually pleasant, and why do we like to be surrounded by it?
- image & narrative: I’ve always been interested in painting as a narrative medium, but as one that gives hints but leaves the story open-ended. I’m giving the audience some suggestive elements and then leaving them to their own devices, depicting all the necessary factors of a story apart from the actions and the protagonists. Again, the subtitles for each of the paintings are probably the strongest hint of what else may be happening that is suggested by the paintings but outside of them. I’ve experimented with writing short stories as exhibition texts before but realized they are not immediate enough for an exhibition context - maybe the subtitles - too long to be titles but too short to be stories - can take on that function.
Titania Seidl, 2017
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