NEW YORK, NY.- James Fuentes presents London-based artist Daisy Parris’ first solo exhibition in New York, The Warm Glow, in collaboration with Sim Smith, London. An exhibition of Parris' works on paper, Concrete Saviour, will be concurrently on view at JamesFuentes.Online.
Irrespective of their scale, an encounter with Parris’ works feels intimate. Passing through the painting, a subtle connection or energy is shared from one human to another. The works are visceral experiences—they feel alive. In some, faux fur affords a fleshy, corporeal structure. Physical and complex, the fur is arduous to paint on. Onto others, Parris applies oil paint straight from the tube, directing its insistent, laborious path with a brush. Scraps of poetry, mantras, observations, and notes to self scrawled onto fragments of canvas hang from the smaller paintings, heavy like flags. Each offers a signaling device, a message from a place where communication is otherwise challenging. These details are part of an internal dialogue, wherein Parris contemplates death, tenderness, human relationships, and the world around them. The Warm Glow is a culmination of such paintings that attempt to rationalize the unfathomable and somehow find comfort in this space.
Parris navigates through this body of work with tremendous feeling—acute, severe, intense, and beautiful—simultaneously capturing life, death, beauty, and horror across the pictorial plane. Here, Parris continues to explore their preoccupation with extreme and incommensurable experiences; pressing at whether healing or beauty can emerge from their personal experience of suffering. “The work is about being cradled and held by the things you’re scared of, and doing the same for them in return. I’m trying to find some form of peace or beauty in the brutal,” Parris says of Cradle the Concrete (2022), one of the largest pieces in the exhibition. Standing in front of another, I'd Rather Get No Sleep Next To You Than Sleep Alone (2022), we may feel as if we are inside it, with its exposed, raw canvas and soft concentric dark red clouds of paint. There are small circular motifs that catch the eye as they surround tiny specks of paint, becoming an exaggeration of themselves and highlighting seemingly insignificant parts of the painting that might otherwise go unnoticed. In all of these ways, Parris brings forth the potential to excavate parts of ourselves we did not know existed.
Daisy Parris (b. 1993, Kent, UK) lives and works in London. They received a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Goldsmiths University, London. Recent solo exhibitions include I see you in everyone I love (2022) and Star-Studded Canopy (2020) at Sim Smith, London; and Pain For Home (2021) at M+B, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include Talk Like Strangers, with Nico Stone, Sebastian Helling, and Jesse Littlefield at Part 2 Gallery, Oakland, CA; What Kind Of Spirit Is This? at Sim Smith, London; and Poem, at Las Palmas Project, Lisbon, Portugal. Parris is represented by Sim Smith, London.
