Working in oil paint on small plywood panels, Parsons creates luminous images in a palette dominated by grey, white, black and blue pigment. Her on-going interest in interiors continues in a number of paintings that variously suggest the basic architecture of interior spaces - in one, simple oblique planes create a view through a passage to a doorway and mysterious space beyond. In another a white square is placed centrally on a dark grey ground like a bright window of light.

Yet in many paintings this simple architecture has become more radically provisional and opened up to the elements. One painting presents five black verticals in an expanse of soft grey, like columns which have lost their ceiling, they are now open to a vast expanse of luminous sky. These dark poles like barometers seem to measure and convey atmospheric density and pressure as well as providing fixed points around which the everchanging elements of light and air revolve.

Vicken Parsons has become increasingly preoccupied with skies and their atmospheres. In some images it is the low curve of the earth or a body of water that frames and opens onto a diffuse endless expanse of the sky. Solid Air presents this new series of sky paintings on whose blue grounds various shapes swell, expand, condense, accumulate in density and colour, break up and disperse. Like clouds but also like smudges, bits of stuff, torn bits of carpet, creamy wisps, snow piles, ripples on water, these are motile and available forms, with things coming into being and passing away.

In contrast are Parsons' new sculptures, assembled out of rectilinear blocks of metal whose sides are painted either grey, black blue or white, and constructed on wood bases, they appear like minimal, hard-edged solid concentrations of light and air - cityscapes of the sky. (quot. Annuska Shane, 2008)

 

 

 

Jeff McMillan, Cautionary Tale, 2005
oil on found painting, 55 x 38 cm
Courtesy Christine König Galerie