The Landscape of Painting, Curator Rebecca Byrne Interviews Artist Selma Parlour
The expansive field of painting leaves much to explore. The group exhibition Pool, plays on the process of painting as an immersive experience via the device of a constructed landscape, a garden. Thirteen artists, all of whom work in and around painting, have been asked to make work that alludes to the theme. As the show has developed at the Griffin Gallery, new connections between the works have become apparent, and aims have altered and shifted.
The construct of a garden has acted as a frame in itself, with ideas embedded in individual pieces moving in and outside its own boundaries. The show begins outside the gallery, with a field of pigment to be walked on and through, and continues inside with paintings that appear and disappear with blasts from a fog machine. Entry to the body of the show is via an immersive work that also presents a tunnel into another world. Once inside, viewers will find suggestions of paths with glimpses and vistas appearing as they progress, both of the garden of works itself and landscapes beyond.
Embracing the openness and inclusivity that is implied by the expanded field, Pool includes framed 2D pieces, moving out into sculptural work, video and performance. Continuing to move beyond the frame, time is embedded in many of the works, the deep time of geological formations, the contemplative time of walking, the present time of performance, and future time in work that will decompose, to be shown again in a new form. Viewers are encouraged to engage with the show directly through deckchairs that can be moved around the space, and a bench for conversation. A performance will happen during the show, unannounced, working with and around the works, possibly undocumented, probably leaving no trace. A path leads to a door in the wall, offering a glimpse of a flickering pool, and the process of washing pigment is shown in a swirling film, suggesting the endless possibilities of painting.
Artist and curator Rebecca Byrne's own work explores interiority and the psychological impact of space in her paintings. In particular, her interest lies in the spaces that people inhabit, the traces left behind in abandoned spaces and thresholds into fantastical places that cannot exist. Speaking candidly with exhibiting artist Selma Parlour, the two invite us to understand the impact of the medium
RB: Rebecca Byrne, Interviewer, Artist, Curator
SP: Selma Parlour, Interviewee, Artist
RB: Selma, why painting? How did you become a painter?
SP: I never really considered doing anything else. I suppose from a young age drawing was something I could do well but I didn’t have a clue what an artist was beyond some romantic ideal. My mum took me to the Tate [Tate Britain] when I was eleven. Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still cemented it. My mum bought 2 Mondrian posters, I was very proud. But I guess that was it for a long time. Art school gave me encouragement and free rein. And so after years of subsequent aimlessness I returned to do a PhD. That gave me a framework from which to build my current practice. It was difficult; I’m not a natural.
RB: To what extent did research impact your practice?
SP: I couldn’t separate the two.
RB: What are your paintings about?
SP: In my paintings I draw upon a host of painting-related conventions and limitations. For example, that a painting is a rectangle (or shaped canvas) suspended on a wall, that it has a flat, smooth surface and an edge or frame so that a new spatial organisation might be convincingly portrayed upon it, that it contains colour and shapes, that it is there to be observed, and so on. An attention to these aspects forms the basis of my practice, while my approach utilises an invented vocabulary of repeatable units. What are my paintings about? Space, colour, inheritance, flatness, surface, in-out left-right, the frame, the wall, picture-making, world-making, illusion, syntax, transparency, shape-shifting, frontality, text, the screen, substitution, modernism, art and architecture, the mutability of the sign…
RB: So representation is key? Do you consider what you do to be abstract painting?
SP: Sometimes.
RB: Could you elaborate on that?
SP: The label ‘abstract painting’ is useful to a point but it doesn’t hold much currency today. Within certain accepted narratives it is difficult to justify painting, let alone abstraction. Yes, my visual language is limited to rectangles and variations of, and yes, this is easily traceable to historic abstraction but a more interesting lineage for me derives from the early modernists who worked through painting’s technical limitations. I’m thinking of Georges Seurat’s viewer-mixed dots and his painted frames and Paul Cézanne’s simultaneous views. My point is I feel attached to more than a visual correlation with Mondrian’s grid; Mondrian was the first to remove painting’s frame, changing the discourse forever. So abstraction as such is not the concern, I’m more interested how it might be used to implicate the viewer.
RB: What else influences your work?
SP: Frank Stella’s irregular polygons and his bands of colour, Jonathan Lasker’s abstract pictures, Robert Mangold’s frame paintings, Ad Reinhardt’s matt blackness, Duccio’s diagrammatic space, Matisse’s colour, flattened space and cut-outs, Giotto’s bands of colour, Agnes Martin’s transparency and repetition, Robert Ryman’s signature, Glenn Brown’s flatness, Tomma Abts’ use of literal and depicted relief, The National Gallery, coloured beads, a box of tangled telephone wire that I grew up with but never transformed.
RB: Can you say a little about your process? These are oil paintings – oil on linen – but they look more like coloured pencil?
SP: I use soft films of transparent oil so that the paintings look drawn or printed. My line is pencil-thin but oil made. I remove a lot of the oil binder enabling me to create a surface that looks parched like chalk pastel. The transparency shows off the qualities of the linen ground. I exploit this by emphasising the linen’s texture as a visual component that, while consistent, might change from area to area. Also, colour is a veil (not a skin) that borrows from the white primer beneath so that colour looks lit from behind, like stained glass or a screen.
RB: And what about flatness and illusion?
SP: The paintings are super flat, like posters rather than paintings. Space is concertinaed, stage-like. I use bands of shaded colour to isolate shapes and to create a restricted spatial illusion. I am constantly thinking about the viewer’s relationship to flatness and invented space.
RB: This is a big year for you having been selected for both the John Moores Painting Prize and the Marmite Prize for Painting, what’s next?
SP: Next, I’m making work for my solo show opening in October at the House of Saint Barnabas in Soho Square. It’s curated by Marcelle Joseph Projects. It’s a site-specific commission to fit the Rocco panelling in the main dining room. The panels are more than 2 meters tall and it’ll be up for a year, so I’m feeling the pressure!
__________________________________________________________________
Rebecca Byrne co-curated ‘Pool’ with fellow artist Liz Elton, an exhibition featuring 13 artists, including Selma Parlour, which explores the expanded field of painting via the device of a constructed landscape, a garden, with works brought together as an immersive experience.
‘Pool’ runs at Griffin Gallery until June 10, 2016
www.griffingallery.co.uk
Feature image credit: Selma Parlour, 'Five, The Side-ness of In-Out', 2016, oil on linen, 61 x 51 cm
