José Parla

 José Parla 

Visit the artists website.

From the Artist's Statement:

"My work is inspired by the anonymous art found in the streets. The art is often in the form of calligraphy or the actions of torn and stripped posters. The inscriptions in my work are used as a form of drawing, and to maintain a record of my observations. In my travels I have encountered a similar dialogue that takes place in most cities. I find compositions on surfaces of deteriorated walls, and remnants of construction markings. 

...

I am using my imagination to capture the psychology of a segmented reality. These realities, which are deposited into our subconscious everyday, are the basis for a dialogue that goes mostly unnoticed. Once these "segmented realities" or images are transferred and converted into paintings they become a "memory document," a sort of time capsule for my experience in history." 

 

Chelsea Museum Curator Manon slome writes of Parla's work:

"The haunting beauty of Parlá’s dense calligraphic line often dissolves into
organic and abstract shapes that resemble drawing rather than writing. In their
multi layered complexity José’s paintings draw the viewer into their
indecipherable depths, but once there, once we have given up the attempt to read
for “content,” we are subsumed in the play of line and color – blues, cool whites,
rusts, reds and umber – drawn further and further into a mesmerizing depth
where stories both happy and sad play out, summoning emotions about life, love,
friends, politics, and sex."

Greg Tate writes:
"There's a saying that goes 'if walls could talk'. Parlá's art arranges means
for the walls to speak in several tongues simultaneously via his 'diaristic' mode
of 'handstyle' glyphs that embrace the calligraphic futurism of graf, and through
well-worked loquacious patinas that elegiacally address the glorious entropy
of urban collapse, anarchy and civil regeneration. The artist's own conceptual
take on his art is embedded in descriptions of it as 'psycho-geography', 'a
segmented reality' and as revelations of the 'memory in the walls'’.