HSoA Gallery | Paintings by Laurence Causse-Parsley

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Your made me happy Magdalena LAC back cover

17 April - 10 June

Private View
Tues 25 April | 6 - 8.30pm
RSVP to info@hsoa.co.uk

Painting the Unseen - Isabel H Langtry, HSoA Principal

I am delighted to be exhibiting the paintings of Laurence Causse-Parsley at HSoA Gallery, London.

Causse-Parsley’s current conceptual concerns are a fusion, a geometry of colours, that also brings together a brilliance of 'mother of pearl', with carefully collaged pictoral dynamics.

There are landscapes reminiscent of Hilma af Klint and like Klint they express abstract concepts beyond what the eye can see. Diebencorn floats in my mind- though in Cause Parsley’s very own highly personal way.

Relevant however is Diebencorn’s experience on a flight in 1951“the earth’s skin itself had ‘presence’—I mean it was all like a flat design—and everything was usually in the form of an irregular grid.”

As is Helen Frankenthaller’s own form of colour field painting- a term referring to the application of large areas, or fields, of colour applied to the pictoral surface.

I love Causse-Parsley’s changes of scale, as well as large formats and simplified compositions, the smaller square paintings feel like windows onto another place, another time, not a meta versa but a ‘material verse’. The planar, rectilinear, horizontal element of the large and midscale paintings are as a deep wildness of human imagination. These are very personal hieroglyphs which translate the visible world into arrangements of colour fields, lines, and quasi-geometric shapes. Causse-Parsley herself talks of the impression created in her mind during a visit to the Saudi Arabian dessert which has influenced her pictoral language.

As the space in the paintings flatten-out, they also create pockets! These almost tangible pocket are often visually stitched together, I feel that I could reach into them and pull out a physical thing! – wonderous. These dark lines of ‘stitching’ are hugely resonant and meaningful to me as a symbol of the way we as artists have evolved.

This stitching represents time itself, in an almost discernible, tantalisingly ‘written’ language. A language that might describe our physical and historic actions that wear and rub as poetry does in its search to align itself to feelings of the past, present- whatever that is, and our future.

It’s all about the colour as Wittgenstein said in his colour treatise, “the thought that what you see as orange could be what I see as blue”, opens up the dialogue on communicating what we interpret by what we see. These paintings stimulate conversation!

With Causse-Parsley, colour is of great importance but so too is the texture, the very landscape that both can create while floating into and out of each other.

The panoramic, ariel, freshness of the works have a resonant modern aesthetic, as does visiting Laurence Causse-Parsley in her studio which was for me like discovering treasure in a sea of wonders.