British artists Vicken Parsons and Paul Noble, born six years apart (1957 and 1963), presented different views of architectural interiors at Christea Roberts Gallery.
in ‘Breath’, Vicken Parsons brought us subtle spring yellow sunshine, along with red and blue, incorporated with a subtle array of shadowy shades of grey, white and black, much needed after February’s storms and record rainfall, in her paintings derived from architectural interiors, alongside new sculptural architectural models, while Paul Noble’s meticulous ‘Rooms with Wallpaper’ were precise, geometric and seemingly endless with no windows, no doors, and no escape – almost like prison cells.
Paul Noble is perhaps best known for his meticulous detailed drawings of urban scenes, the most ambitious of which was his 15-year project, ‘Nobson Newton’, in which he created an imaginary city which, like the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, didn’t hold back on showing the dark and sinister side of life, with ‘bestiality, cannibalism, decapitation, and other horrors among its dense detail’. These new precise prison-like interiors ‘Rooms with Wallpaper’ were almost the opposite – leaving it to the viewer to imagine what might go on inside them.