The Universe Makers: Bassmi Ibrahim, Dellamarie Parrilli, Victoria Lowe, John Lyon Paul, and Anne Marchand: A Virtual Group Exhibition Curated by Dominique Nahas

The Work of Bassmi Ibrahim, Dellamarie Parrilli, Victoria Lowe,
John Lyon Paul, and Anne Marchand
By Dominique Nahas
©2021
Bassmi Ibrahim, Dellamarie Parrilli, Victoria Lowe, John Lyon Paul,
and Anne Marchand are our universe-makers. To place their highly
differentiated abstract aesthetic visions together so that they seem to
react and inspire each other reminds me that this exhibition of visual
persuasions is perhaps like visual chamber music of individual voices,
heard collectively. These individual voices, passionately unique, create
indelible experiences for the beholder.
Bassmi Ibrahim's Isness series are meditatively induced visual
exaltations (he would perhaps call his artworks "emanations" as they
draw you into his soul-world). Using giant soft Chinese brushes Bassmi
creates extraordinarily suggestive, sonorously layered liquid forms ---
entities possessing, seemingly, individual personalities. Each softly
shaped abstract form, like a taxonomic laboratory specimen plucked out
of an imaginary collection of gigantic organisms, floats in stillness, on
an undifferentiated white expanse. Taken together Bassmi's color fields
are paradoxical in appearance --- mesmerizingly so. Vaporous, veil like
yet robust, his open-ended forms easily elicit the suggestion of after-
image contours of a flower or a sea creature, or of an air-bound and
fleeting entity.
Dellamarie Parrilli's painterly abstractions are compositions that are all
at once structured, experimental and playful. Works such as Blue Iris
and Heart Connection (both 2016) bespeak of a vision that passionately
attempts at grasping an essence, a central nature that is then extended
outward from centrality to peripherality. In later works produced in 2017

as in Aperture, Seek, and In Search Of Parrilli creates painterly
emanations suggestive of energetic systems whose intensely colored
paint strokes are thickly layered to create the illusion of relief, a
dimensionalized world of gritty punk- lacework.
Victoria Lowe's exquisite works on canvas and on paper glow with
saturated auras and colored coronas. Her Ener Space series of giclée
prints have a rapturous other-worldly quality that seem to ask how do we
experience, how do we dream, how do we conjure up the immateriality
of time and space as well as of timelessness itself? Lowes's abstract
realms suggest purely eidetic manifestations of ambient becoming, of
boundless expansion. Equally marvelous her artworks are so radically
reduced and understated they seem to resonate with moments of quiet
revelation.
John Lyon Paul's immersive abstractions painted on glass seem to be
meditations on the tension between dispersed fragmentation and
harmonious togetherness. His combination of illuminated micro-spaces
and patterns recall filigreed intervals and retinal floaters that have the
ethereal radiance of stained-glass windows. Paul's artworks are hushed
visual meditations as well as measured reflections of possibilities.
Anne Marchand's colorful aesthetic vision is an involvement in an
overall sensibility that delights in an abandonment to sensuous
immanence and no small sense of mystery. One senses an enormous
physicality in this work. As in Overview Effect (2019) Marchand
conveys a near-ecstatic concern animating universes of swirling,
congregating, interacting forms. The artist's acrylic, enamel, and ink
brushstrokes constitute veils and swathes of colors comprised of
different viscosities. They converge in a play of presence and absence on
what might be immense, restless fields of time and shifting space.