Daisy Parris: Weird Rain

James Fuentes is pleased to present Daisy Parris, Weird Rain at the gallery’s Los Angeles location. Known for their intensively textured, graphically hued paintings, in this new body of work Parris embarks on a pursuit of the color yellow and all that it may hold. Pushing the color to its limit, Parris seeks yellows that conjure sensations at once eerie, electric, and enigmatic. These are shades we cannot hide from; garish and fiercely unapologetic hues that upend common associations to spark memories of unfiltered joy and loss.

Parris approaches painting itself in a similar way, in which the static object that we encounter enacts and undergoes a process of continual renewal through transference—whereby emotion becomes material, and matter becomes emotionally charged. When beginning a painting, Parris will clean their used brushes directly onto a new, raw canvas, creating a kind of ground map that is consciously messy and unprecious. Then, applying dense, almost dried-out paint directly from the tube, Parris drags pigment across the picture plane as far as it will stretch—stoking tension with, and at the same time relinquishing control of, their materials. As this ground builds into a thick, sticky color field, Parris continues adding while also scraping away and carving in. Through these impatient gestures and strokes, the pigments begin to writhe, as temerarious expressions of yellow blur into grimy grays, rub against chalky pinks, and sink into tar-pit greens.

Text, too, appears in much of the work as another pliant substance. In the studio, Parris will inscribe written fragments on scraps of canvas which ultimately are adhered to their larger compositions in varied, obscured orientations. This addition is conceived of as a painterly gesture, wherein their poetic prose is not intended to be explicitly legible but instead to be absorbed as another form of brushstroke in the work. Every line delivers a potent if indecipherable emotional observation, stripped of context and disinterested in explanation. In certain places, Parris peels off these scribblings completely, leaving an impression that marks an illusive, unsettling loss.

Pulled directly, or closely adapted, from these inscriptions embedded in the paintings, the title of each work echoes a sense of finality. Yellow is invoked as a verb; a state of aging, ailing, and fading. Like a mantra, each time Parris’ words repeat—and as their paints pace further—their messages soak in deeper, eventually releasing formal structure altogether and transforming into pure gestures and inexpressible beliefs.