Desire and Danger Barry Schwabsky
(reproduced from Perfume River Series -- Carolanna Parlato, 2000)

When she exhibited her recent "Perfume River" series, Carolanna Parlato told me, people kept asking if the paintings represented a particular place. The question was not
unreasonable. The works' reminiscences, in their compositions, of the bird's-eye viewpoint of topographical maps, on the one hand, and of the stylized space of Chinese landscape painting on the other, certainly allows the paintings to evoke feelings associated with landscape. But as the artist insists--and despite the fact that the title "Perfume River" was in fact taken from the name of a real river that runs through Vietnam--her work is completely nonobjective. Compared to her previous work, there is a newfound intricacy to these paintings, and a capacity to incorporate many different levels of scale that is not the norm in abstraction, and easily suggests naturalistic origins. Nonetheless, it is made without reference to any specific sources outside what is suggested to her by the properties of her materials themselves: the fluidity and resistance of her paints and the optical interactions of the colors they bear.

And yet the name "Perfume River" has a symbolic resonance for me too -- not a topographical association, but a metaphorical one. An old blues song fantasizes about a river of whiskey, but what would a river of perfume be like? I keep thinking of a stream that, as it flows, exudes a subtly yet insistently fragrance so seductive that it draws passersby to it inexorably. When they reach its banks, entranced by its bewitching aroma, they drink deeply, or even plunge in bodily, and are immediately poisoned, for perfume after all is not water. So the name "Perfume River," for me, conveys a feeling about the nexus of desire and danger, of seductive beauty and resistant artifice. And whether Parlato intended that connotation or not, it is one that is more than the isolated effect of a title, I find it confirmed, consistently, in the paintings themselves.

Look for instance, at Perfume River V, with its palette, not atypical for Parlato's recent work, of sour-apple greens and kiddy-furniture pink and blue. Bright, flavorful, and above all strikingly eccentric in an artistic context, the colors not only strike the eye but also draw it in. and with the way these sweet and sour color areas surge and whirl in and out of each other, sometimes in great waves sometimes in minute rivulets that sometimes become as intricate as the marbled endpapers of old books, they evoke a slow but nonetheless powerful flow in which vision might cast off its everlasting burden of specifying, identifying, and controlling its objects and simply give itself over passively to the current, riding like a drunken boat through the painting's brilliantly colored welter.

And yet as insistently as the beguiling, flagrantly artificial colors and their fluid entanglement hold out this invitation the painting's surface rebuffs it. Hard, cold and opaque, it bars entry. This is surface that categorically remains surface, never becomes space, cannot be entered. Instead it sends the eye back out to a distance, from which the interacting colors and shapes once again produce the illusion of habitable space. We're back where we started from, but in the process of getting there we've had the pleasure of both falling for an illusion and being harmlessly disenchanted. We look at the painting, the second time around, more wisely but perhaps more fondly as well. Perfume River V - and the same is true of any of Parlato's other recent paintings--takes you on a journey. And somehow, both the painting and its viewer turn out a little bit different when its over.