Blank pixel used during image takedowns
José Parlá opens his new exhibit Walls, Diaries & Paintings, tonight in New York City at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery. The collection is an evolution of the New York-based, Miami-born, Cuban artist's work, and his new series of paintings closely resemble the walls that have shaped Parla's life. Like his work before, this exhibit is a must see, and copies of his new monograph of the same title will be for sale at the show. The opening is tonight from 6-9 at Bryce Wolkowitz, located at 505 W 24th Street, New York City, and runs through April 16th. Go to this show, but before you do, click on for a preview of the work on display and an interview with Parlá where he breaks down his process, inspiration, and some of the key elements of each work.
Gallery Lead
José Parlá says: “The title of the show is Walls, Diaries, and Paintings, and it’s the first solo show in NY since I did Layered Days in 2008. My work has always been influenced by my earliest days painting on walls, and by my paying attention to walls and what happens to them. In history you can see that walls have always been a part of art, like the cave paintings and hieroglyphics that we grew up studying in school. In the ’80s, growing up, I was heavily influenced by and I became a writer through the New York system of subway art. I had my personal transformation experimenting on walls, on trains, and at the same time on canvases, on jackets—a lifestyle blend. So this show is pretty much about that—it’s the walls influencing my work, the idea that these paintings are journals. I want all those elements to culminate in this New York Show because I’ve been based here about 16 years, and it’s going to be the platform to continue the language of my work for shows that are coming up in London, Milan, and Los Angeles. This is chapter one."
Victory
Victory, 2010
5 x 10 feet collage, acrylic, plaster, enamel spray paint, plaster and ink on canvas.
José Parlá says: “This piece has a lot to do with New York. It is made with posters that I collected from around Chinatown, Williamsburg, the Bronx, and Coney Island. It’s just tiny bits, but you can see that there’s Hebrew lettering, Chinese posters, that there’s Italian imagery, and that there’s different things that are happening throughout the city that really is so mixed.
"For a series like this, I start thinking and collecting for the whole series, not just one specific painting. So I’m thinking, 'I’m going to need certain elements, so I start to go around collecting posters around the city' and then I take the pieces apart. I have a tub and sink that I use to soak them and then little by little, they come apart. So then I have all of these pieces that I use on the paintings. I’ll concentrate on one thing, and then on the other, creating the whole show as a body of work. I do have a lot of thought behind the work, so they’re not just a pure abstraction. The show was probably built over a year, a process of setting myself up to be spontaneous. There’s a balance between thought, preparation, and then spontaneity."
Your History
Your History, 2010
4 x 6 feet collage, acrylic, enamel spray paint, plaster and ink on wood.
José Parlá says: “This one also has elements of New York to it, but it’s more about a trip to Paris that I took. Because the work is abstracted, you can read the work through your own experiences, through feeling. Like, when I’ve been in front of an abstract painting, like a Jackson Pollack, I’m trying to interpret what the artist was thinking, I’m trying to read into it. And then what ends up happening is that it transfers into my own experience. So I start thinking about abstract painters and I start thinking about my work, and although some of these can remind you directly of walls, like segments or fragments of the city, they are ultimately a form of abstraction. I start to think these pieces are about the human experience, about the dilemmas that we have, and they’re about the decay in society and the deterioration we see. Politics, the environment, all of those kind of things, and at the end they’re all pretty pictures. They’re not like colorful, or traditionally beautiful, but they have their own beauty. But it’s a beauty that is grounded in a type of deterioration and decay."
The Struggle Continues
The Struggle Continues, 2010
4 x 6 feet collage, acrylic, gel medium, plaster and ink on wood.
José Parlá says: “This painting is a simplified version of the others. I almost want it to be one of those paintings that resembles an actual wall, like big, gigantic chunks of it fell off. I want it to feel like it was something that was there a long time ago. I imagine that from above there are like, pipes releasing water for years, and junk and paint up there that has been crumbling and falling and covering this. I wanted to show that there’s time gone by. On city walls, you might have a homeless guy that wrote something or tore something or wrote, 'MARIA' or like, a guy who attacked it or tagged it, but that all happened over, like, months or years."
Order, Pattern, Organization, Form and Relationship
Order, Pattern, Organization, Form and Relationship, 2010
4 x 6 feet acrylic and ink on wood.
José Parlá says: "I wanted to do something that’s really talking about the times today, so this painting is fiery and organic with these reds and burnt colors. This piece is inspired by a wall that used to be on Nevins street in Brooklyn, which they tore down. It was a wooden wall in front of a halfway house, where people coming out of drug addiction and jail stayed while they tried to pull their life together. I’ve always noticed, for years, for the ten years that I’ve been in this neighborhood, that there was a guy, or a woman for all I know, writing all over it with mathematical equations, combined with really political thoughts. Things like, “CIA OFFICE PHONE NUMBER: 212…” “NATO EXPRESS” “GET YOUR COMMUNISM HERE”...Stuff like that. And then they would have all of these mathematical equations on there as well, and I knew it was the same person all this time, because it was in the same handstyle. These writings that you see in my painting in white are basically an interpretation of his writings, but transferred into my lettering and my calligraphy. They are actually copied from a photograph I took of that wall, so it’s kind of like this madness that I felt when I saw it."
If I was Water
If I was Water, 2010
6 x 10 feet acrylic, ink enamel, water based ink, enamel spray paint and plaster on canvas.
José Parlá says: “The title for this comes from ‘My Melody’ by Rakim. I’m an old hip-hop cat, and I painted this piece to that song. There is a line, ‘If I was water/I’d flow in the Nile’. I listen to music all the time, I go dancing and used to do the whole B-Boy thing, and there’s a certain rhythm to my process, I paint lines in a similar way that I would move to music. Like I move with the work, and I just know how to move when I'm painting a certain type of line. Like when I’m painting a long line I know where it is going to land and I don’t have to look at the canvas. I chose the words 'If I was water' because I thought it was nice to have that secret for people who know the song. They’ll know the rest of that lyric."
