Jose Parla

José Parlá is an artist who assumes several roles in order to create his work; he acts as a historical transcriber, and a visual raconteur. As a transcriber, he records his experiences in calligraphic and palimpsestic code. Serving as a collection of textually chronicled memories, the markings appear on backdrops that resemble the distressed surfaces he encounters – the cosmetic results of passed time – city walls marred from layers of paint, old posters, and years of neglect. As a storyteller, Parlá presents a leitmotif of an enigmatic narrative, reaching to translate moments that only a visual dialogue can convey. Parlá's works have appeared in major exhibitions in London, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Paris, and recently in Stages for the Livestrong Foundation at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris. Deitch Projects, New York,and O.H.W.O.W in Miami.  In upcoming events, Parlá will have a solo show titled: Walls, Diaries, and Paintings at Bryce Wolkowitz this March, 2011, which will be accompanied by a new monograph published by Hatje Cantz.
 
José Parlá studied painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, and The New World School of the Arts in Miami, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
 
"Caught very much in the moment, Parlá's time is always transitory, a measure of echoes rather than certainties, a resonance of history where absence constitutes a more formidable presence than anything so shiny and new as the present." - Carlo McCormick
 
"Like Gerhard Richter, Parlá sees our art-historical notions of abstraction and abstract expressionism as having inextricably and poetically woven themselves in our contemporary understanding of the real, the authentic, the dramatic, the historic, the classic, the modern, the global, the magical, the African, the human." - Greg Tate
 
"Parlá concentrates on the problems inherent in the change of context from the street to the galleries that few of the old school writers had successfully negotiated. A notable exception is, of course, SAMO, who later painted under his given name, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Parlá's work takes off from and expands on these roots." - Joan Waltemath for the Brooklyn Rail