Emilie Houldsworth
Chiaroscuro

With Chiaroscuro, Parri Blank presents Emilie Houldsworth’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and her first solo presentation in Europe beyond the UK. The exhibition examines how systems of order, proportion, and control shape perception and contemporary notions of beauty.

Bringing together recent works developed during her residency at Palazzo Monti, Italy, and in the UK, Chiaroscuro unfolds through visual and material dualities—light and dark, soft and hard, order and chaos, decorative and industrial.

At the core of the exhibition are works developed during Houldsworth’s time in Italy. Drawing on the visual logic of Renaissance fresco painting—linear perspective, geometric organisation, and proportional harmony—these works engage with classical systems through which beauty was historically stabilised and codified. Rather than referencing fresco painting iconographically, Houldsworth translates its underlying structures into a contemporary visual language, reconfiguring historical order through layered colour fields and precisely cut metal frameworks.

The works resist a fixed reading as either painting or object. Colour appears suspended and atmospheric, while the metal framework operates simultaneously as structure, drawing, and boundary. This interplay creates an oscillation between surface and depth, image and construction, control and fluidity. Hand-crafted processes are set against industrial precision, allowing moments of instability to emerge within an otherwise rigorously organised system.
A smaller group of works developed in the UK extends this investigation into everyday visual environments. Turning to overlooked forms—such as refuse bins or utilitarian architectural details—Houldsworth treats these motifs as coded systems that quietly structure perception. Loosely referencing the tradition of still life, these works introduce questions of labour, class, and aesthetic value, without shifting the exhibition’s primary focus.

Across Chiaroscuro, pattern, code, and material structure function as both organising principles and points of tension. Classical ideals of harmony and proportion are confronted with contemporary conditions of technological mediation and image saturation. Beauty emerges not as a stable ideal, but as something contingent—produced through systems that can be reassembled, disrupted, and reimagined.