Dio Horia is pleased to present a solo booth of 10 new works from Selma Parlour’s coveted Salon Painting series. Parlour (b. 1976, Johannesburg, South Africa. London-based) is an award-winning artist whose recent achievements include an Abbey Award at the British School at Rome (a 3-month paid Fellowship, 2023).
Parlour's meticulous oil paintings appear as though they're drawn, dyed, or printed. Alongside her delicately-shaded bands and pencil-thin (oil-made) lines, colour is a veil (not a skin) imitating the backlit quality of the screen and ensuring that every decision is evident. The artist is known for her units of luminous colour, diagrammatic space, codified illusion, haptic surfaces, and her abstract-paintings-of-photography's-installation-shot-of-abstract-painting.
Parlour’s invented coda to historic abstraction and minimalism reassesses painting’s in/extrinsic conventions. Recurrent in modern art is the assertion of painting’s objectness over and above its facility for illusion. In her Salon Painting series the artist applies illusion to the modernist grid, situating colour-relational abstract paintings as antithetical to history. If read as codified representations of framed paintings in a salon hang, an abstract painting not only references the pragmatics of display, it does so through an internal differentiation of serial images set out as such.
Parlour’s solo presentation expands the possibilities of abstraction by bringing haptic qualities and perception to the forefront of the genre.
