Pick Me Up - 2025
Spray paint and grout on canvas
40 x 40 cm
“Parnas’ paintings achieve a similar effect, albeit through different means. To the right of the central chair sits a small, framed painting of a hazily defined bear on a heavily textured white background. Again, Parnas plays with the ubiquity and non-identity of the mass produced: the work’s white frame may be that of print found at a chain hotel or cafe. However, the defining factor of the piece is its heavily worked surface. In thick strokes, Parnas has applied viscous white paint, frosting-like, across the work’s flat surface. This is only accentuated by the paint of the bear, thickly brown and applied with impasto stabs. The artist’s hand makes an indelible mark, asserting its presence. The work and its frame sit as contradictory, and yet the visual and functional operations of each remain coherent: the frame is relegated to the trivial, the personhood and presence of the artist made paramount. Contradiction is swallowed whole, with the artist’s work standing both in defiance of, and a synthesis of, dialectical opposition.”
- Moses MacIntyre, FAD Magazine, review of No Plaice Like Home, COLAB Tower, London