Zoë Carlon

Around the edges: recent work on paper

29 April—8 June 2024

South Parade presents Around the edges: recent work on paper, a solo exhibition by Zoë Carlon. 

An uninhabited restaurant noted down a sided street; chairs stationed and upright, menu half-opened, waiting to be read. Venetian red daubs of geraniums lining a train station walkway, the blushing petals and stems sprawled over containers, languishing limbs stretching out. Another moment, one finds themselves by a window with a garden beyond it - or perhaps the viewer is outside looking in, at the potted plant within the window’s inner sill. Subject matter ushers for the viewer to draw nearer, to allow petals to brush lightly over skin, to take a seat at the vacant table. To wait for another to join, to let the scene unfurl.

Zoë Carlon captures the blurring textures and coloured streaks of our pedestrian lives through her paintings on paper, bringing inanimate material to life. She expresses how she is most drawn to interior spaces and the stylised environments we engage with every day - the theatre of our lives, the sets we build up and take apart. In particular, the constructed displays of planters in town centres, flowers extracted from their natural landscape then presented in stationed vessels; an act of care in planting them, but all the while staged. In her images of interiority, windows and cafe seating come to the fore, providing glimpses into commuters’ lives and fleeting sights of a transitory world.

Zoë notes how each painting is a different encounter, but when presented together could be perceived as one travel experience, moments of the same journey. Viewers might see the visuals as being parts of the same narrative, absorbed like stills from a film. Zoë is, however, not wishing to push a singular narrative, wanting to keep it open instead; for viewers to feel these moments of discovery and intrigue in their own traversals. Through specific cropping of the subject attention is given to certain detailing, translating visual language into multiple entry points or meanings, removing the site-specificity of the source. In doing so, she isolates central images further - be that a balustrade, bouquet or stretch of blurred sunlit trees, the visual becoming less recognisable, to create a more homogenous, anonymous architecture of each captured landscape.

Colour and gesture is deeply considered; what the images could become spatially, the feeling inherent in selected tones. Her paintings choose to disregard the original subject matters’ colour palette, focusing more intensely on colours that elevate emotions felt, notably indigo and royal blues, charcoal greys and forest greens, or rich ochres and reds. Adding depth with every new application of oil paint, her works move between loose painting motions to more concentrated mark-making, contributing to the building of a vignette. As viewers engage with each work, they too are meandering. Here through Zoë’s astute gaze, lies a practice of attention and tenderness, inviting the next passerby to accompany her in looking.

Text by Lucy Rose Cunningham 

Zoë Carlon (b. 1993, Wakefield, UK) lives and works in Wakefield and studied at the University of Leeds (2013 - 2017) and Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Budapest). Recent solo exhibitions / presentations include Feria Material, Vol. 9 (Mexico City, 2023) and Strange Comfort, South Parade (London, 2021-22). Recent selected group shows include Moving In, Super Super Markt (Berlin, 2023), Material Poetics, South Parade x The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ (London, 2022), This must be the place, The Art House (Wakefield, 2022), CHRONICLES 5, Galerie Droste x KPM Berlin (Berlin, 2022), Wish Lush (curated by Elaine Tam & Arthur Gouillart), Kravitz Contemporary x JM Gallery (London, 2022), Dialogues No1, Centre for Recent Drawing (London, 2021) and From Cellar to Garrett, South Parade (London 2021). Zoë’s work can be found in the public collections of The Government Art Collection (London), FUAM Collection (Leeds) and the Royal Drawing School Collection (Cumnock).

Photography: Corey Bartle-Sanderson