Perfectionism: A Trick of the Eye

Curated by Becca Pelly-Fry

July.16 - September.16.2020

Selma Parlour

Born 1976 in Johannesburg, South Africa, Selma Parlour lives and works in London. Parlour holds a BA, MFA and PhD in Fine Art from De Montfort University, University of Reading and Goldsmiths University, respectively.

“My oil paintings are meticulously rendered through soft films of oil so that imagery appears as though it’s drawn, dyed, or printed. I conceive of my practice through a syntactical lens contriving a self-styled coda to historic abstract painting in order to reassess its in/extrinsic conventions. I’m perhaps best known for my luminous colour, diagrammatic space, and my abstract-paintings-of-photography’s-installation-shot-of-abstract-painting.” 

With these works Selma Parlour’s characteristic motifs are now replicated by a laser-engraving machine put in to service (by way of a digital file) to remove miniscule incremental degrees of white primed surface. This creates subtle tonal variations of primer (by adjusting the speed of the laser), and finally reveals the actual raw linen surface within/beneath. 

The artist’s unique laser-engraved process evokes thoughts on: drawing, erasure, surface, touch, cutting, illusion, as well as authorship and automated production. That Selma Parlour’s transparent films of oil (where colour is a veil not a skin) leave no room for contrary ideas or miscalculations, mark this new surface-bound tactic as all the more apt.

Selma Parlour, Compile time III, 2017, oil on linen, 150 cm x 160cm, 59 in x 63 in

Miniaturised Minimalism

In the playful Miniaturised Minimalism series identical mock salon hangs of laser-made ‘paintings’ (floating rectangles) provide a fixed starting point across each canvas ready for multifarious compositions of fictitious gallery displays. With space curtailed to surface, this duplicated diagram stays time whilst sequential ordering and oil painted inflections recall the roster aspect of exhibition installations. 

The uniform collection of pre-set ‘paintings’ includes a grid, a reference to the modernist emblem as critiqued by Rosalind Krauss who notably remarked that if a grid maps anything it maps surface. Analogous with Agnes Martin’s pragmatic graphite repetitions (her coordinates not her resolutely homogenised lattice), this Lilliputian grid proves a fitting system detailing the calibrated progression of machined erasure from intact primer to exposed linen. This reductio ad absurdum explains the material whilst simultaneously figuring a pictorial trait (as shading implies an imagined external light source). With her labour secondary to a digital file and efficient and unmatchable flawless process, oil painted information is close to being read as mere garnish; yet such shifting embellishments (when coupled to a premeditated recurring production line effect) accent painting’s fluxes nature, i.e. how another time generates other choices, impulses, intuitions, results, and degrees of chance and efficacy. By the same line of reasoning, each modifier here signals the forfeiture of nonexistent parallel moves.

EXHIBITIONS:

Activities for the Abyss, Pi Artworks, London (2019, solo); Upright Animal, curated by Sacha Craddock, Pi Artworks, London (2018, solo); Parlour Games, Marcelle Joseph Projects, House of St Barnabas, London (2016, site-specific, solo); MOT International, London (2012, solo); Selma Parlour & Yelena Popova, Horton Gallery, New York (2012); and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA, London (2011). 

COLLECTIONS:

The Saatchi Gallery, London; and the Creative Cities Collection, Beijing.

AWARDS:

Arts Council England Creative Development Award (2020), Mark Rothko Memorial Trust Artist-in-Residence Award (2018), the Sunny Dupree Family Award for a Woman Artist, Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017), and the John Moores Painting Prize (2016, prizewinner). Other notable awards are her artist residency at Dio Horia, Athens and Mykonos, Greece (Invited, 2015), and a runner-up award from the Arts Foundation, UK (2014). During her doctoral studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, Selma Parlour received a Research Support Award (2012), and went on to complete her practice-led PhD in Art in 2014. That same year her work was selected for Thames and Hudson’s international competition and publication: 100 Painters of Tomorrow.