James Fuentes Gallery

The exhibition explores the beauty and peace that can be found in brutality and loss. The exhibition is a culmination of paintings which attempt to rationalize the unfathomable—passing and death—and somehow find comfort in this space. In this series of work, Parris continues to explore their preoccupation with the extreme and the coexistence of juxtaposed experiences; pressing at whether healing or beauty can be found among the harsh, hard, and brutal.

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. “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. The work is painted on faux fur, a surface that affords Parris a fleshy, corporeal structure. Physical and complex, the fur is arduous to paint on. It portrays the visceral experience of their paintings perfectly: they are alive, suspended somewhere between tenderness and violence. 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 where communication is otherwise challenging. They are part of an internal dialogue, contemplating death, tenderness, human relationships, and the world around them. Dangling and protruding, Parris also finds some humor in these details—they are suddenly more extravagant than functional.

Intimacy is at the heart of The Warm Glow, as is hope—possibly the most central component to Parris’ paintings, surrounding their practice and in turn engulfing us whole. We cannot escape the intimacy of these works irrespective of their scale. When standing in front of the almost 15-foot painting 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. “The paintings are about all extremes existing together. Blood and guts and the insides of a human, but the softest, warmest flesh.” This weighs heavy on paint and heavy on the mind and body. We feel it moving down and across, sprawling and ever-moving. There are small circular motifs that catch the eye as they surround tiny specks of paint, becoming an exaggeration of themselves, highlighting seemingly insignificant parts of the painting that might otherwise go unnoticed. Parris uses this motion to slow us down, to move us closer to the work, nearer, before it envelops us.

Parris' instinct for peace and harmony and their aptitude for universal communication brings forth the potential to excavate parts of ourselves we did not know existed. Parris taps into our ability to not only endure, but to seek out moments where the world feels impossibly wonderful regardless of the unrelenting nature of life. We feel hopeful and at peace, as if suspended in this world that Parris has created.

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.