Selma Parlour: Yonder Cloud

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These elegant paintings belie a rigorous process that sees the weave of the soft linen substrate exposed within colour. And, colour – pastel, vivid, sour – is ‘backlit’ by the white primer beneath creating a glow reminiscent of the photograph or screen.  

From Piet Mondrian’s homogenisation of pictorial space, to Jonathan Lasker’s impasto lattices and Heimo Zobernig leaving his masking tape attached to his canvas, the modernist grid is synonymous with an assertion of painting as a literal object, over and above its facility for illusion.

Conversely, Parlour reimagines the grid as a site for illusion. For Yonder Cloud, her grids are patterns of relation but they can also be read as codified representations of multiple paintings in a salon hang. While an abstract painting commenting on the pragmatics of its display is familiar territory for abstraction (e.g., Robert Ryman), in her Salon Paintings Parlour uses abstraction to re-present representation as such. Or, as a certain surrealist might have put it: this is not a salon hang.