SELMA PARLOUR | Warp & Weft: Dio Horia is pleased to present 'Warp & Weft' solo show by Selma Parlour. The exhibition opens on Saturday, September 17, 19:00 – 22:00 at the gallery’s new space in Acropolis, showcasing a total of 15 new works.

The title of this exhibition, ‘Warp & Weft’, referring to the components of woven fabric (the longitudinal warp and traversing weft), Parlour speaks to oppositions while shining a light on the necessary constituent of painting traditionally overlooked: its material substrate. In paintings like Red Wall III, the weave of the linen ground is exposed within colour, however in the majority of these works, transparent colour, ‘backlit’ by the white primer beneath, stresses the liminal space between an image and its structural support.

The modernist grid is emblematic of structure; indeed, since Piet Mondrian homogenised pictorial space, abstract painting has asserted painting’s objectness over and above its facility for illusion. In her original contribution to this inheritance, Parlour applies illusion to the grid thus unsettling historical pronouncements. In works like Warp & Weft III, Parlour’s signature shaded bands of colour describe a truncated sense of space through trompe l’oeil illusion, not to trick the viewer, but as a diagram of an idea, like traces of humanity focusing symbolically on relationships between compositional elements. Further to the grid as patterns of relation, Parlour’s rectangles of colour can be read as codified representations of framed paintings in a Salon hang (a convention of displaying multiple paintings together popular in the 17th – 19th Century). In this reading, the interval of white shapeshifts from denoting ‘absence’ to ‘wall’, an abstract painting, therefore, uses representation to speak to the pragmatics of display.

In her Eftsoons series (an archaic word meaning ‘soon after’), Parlour, too late to be a modernist herself, draws inspiration from Robert Mangold’s in/outside configuration of his Frame Paintings, as well as Frank Stella’s mitre-joints and concentric bands. Separate to such established visual language, Parlour’s units can cast a shadow or fade into another colour. In some works, thin bands appear as though they’re pencil-drawn, when in fact they’re created in oils.

Parlour underscores two-dimensionality through imagery imagined as scenery flats (flat-backed units as with theatre’s stage sets). In Green Red Blue II & III the artist borrows from Matisse’s The Red Studio, 1911,and Ellsworth Kelly’s Green Blue Red, 1963, schematically thinking through opacity, in/outside space, and the edge. This isn’t postmodern quotation, Parlour revels in the possibilities of oppositions, and abstract vocabulary.