Selma Parlour

'My paintings are meticulously rendered through soft films of oil on linen to look as though they are drawn, dyed or printed. My interest is in painting's in extrinsic conventions and the technical problems of the medium. Central to my invented vocabulary are: the frame, flatness, surface,transparency, trompe l'oeil illusion, bands and units of isolated colour, repetition (with variation and displacement), frontality and the singularly-framed and fixed view, and the re-presentation of art and context. The paintings are effectively diagrams or templates; illusion is codified through shaded bands and colour is in-laid as if through a process of marquetry. Colour is a veil (not a skin). The literal transparency of colour borrows from the white primer beneath so that colour glows as if lit from behind. This backlit quality is reminiscent of the screen and photograph. The analogue apes the digital; whilst the space of painting is imagined as a two-dimensional stage space that curtails fictive distance as it represents it.’ ...