Selma Parlour: Upright Animal

About

Parlour’s recent paintings have pristine surfaces that project an extraordinary level of luminous colour. Through the gossamer-like application of the oil, so intrinsic to her practice, Parlour enables colour to appear as a veil rather than a skin, subtly revealing each decision she makes. Soft fields of colour are punctuated by shaded bands with exacting graphic finesse. The paintings carry sharp diagrammatic shapes and moments that isolate and juxtapose certain hues in order to accentuate the sensation that they are dyed or printed. Parlour’s work possesses multiple paradoxes; the transparent colour in concert with the white ground beneath, creates the illusion that the paintings are in fact screens, and the work is otherworldly, imbued with the artist’s illusory and tactile process.

Parlour shows how abstract painting can be mediated by its related processes and conventions. In her new series Detail Shot (2017), tablet-size works pose as detail photographs of paintings, seemingly reproduced segments from other paintings in the show, or conceivable fragments from the real world. Colour study. Slide to scroll I (2017) is a triptych in which the sequential units of colour, arranged like Apple’s iOS home screen layout, allude to the swiping touch with which we have become so familiar. Upright animal (2017) is a series of large ‘human-size’ paintings that imitate and challenge the austerity of the white cube gallery space. Here, Parlour’s shaded bands form architectural shapes where impenetrable spaces, doors and walls are able to slide like minimal stage sets.