Untitled (2021) by Oliver Parry Newman

Untitled (2021) by Oliver Parry Newman
Single colour risograph print, A3, £10 + pp

It is a drawing of minute detail, painstakingly rendering a room of dishevelment, full of paraphernalia, cultural detritus and body parts. Presented in the tradition of still life, a representation of inanimate objects, it reproduces a room whilst also unhinging an internal landscape, a banal scene as brain receptors are flooded with extraterrestrial objects.
In its panoramic view we are presented with the alien realism of logos, cartoon characters, and psychoactive drugs mixing with tender feet, trees blowing in the wind and shadows lingering.
In this drawing, as in his publication coming out on in the new couple of weeks, the reproduction of a scene, moment, or experience is always about images from somewhere else, another time, another place, another brain, another chemical. Is it still possible to navigate a form of ‘realism’ or effective representation within a
contemporary technologically advanced culture?
Parry-Newmans repeated investigations of psychoactive drugs, can be seen as response to this. An experience of realism today is constructed in the shadow of the science of endorphin rushes, doom scrolling and brain rot. The technological change of chemical levels in the brain. A committed realism is now in the realm of the altered state.
But for all the notions of hyper reality, technological abstraction and psychoactive drugs in this print, Parry-Newmans lasting effort is one quite conservative in its own way. He is committed to representing a scene as he sees it, and with great beauty he does that, with only a pencil and an eye.