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April 26th -
May 18th, 2007
Monster Children Gallery
Sydney, Australia
Born in Miami into a family of Cuban exiles, José Parlá
moved to Puerto Rico at a very early age before returning to Miami
again when he was nine. He currently lives and works in New York, and
only recently traveled to Cuba for the first time. His life, like his
work, is therefore at once extremely particular and generally
reflective of the wanderings of today's urban populations. In the
context of these migrations and upheavals, Parlá is concerned
with the way that cities function as palimpsests, upon which the
experiences of those who pass through them are materially inscribed in
decay, in writing, in the well-worn paths of their inhabitants.
Parlá's work attempts to extract and synthesize fragments of
these urban environments in flux and reproduce them using the materials
and methods of architectural construction: cement, wood, vinyl as well
as those of traditional art like paper, paint, powdered dye, wax, and
ink. Yet because these fragments are inflected by the memories and
experience of the artist, he considers them to be paintings in sense
that is probably truer than one that refers merely to the physical
presence of pigments and oil. Parlá describes the object of his
method as segmented realities or memory documents. Leading these ideas
to form a personal philosophy of his work he calls Contemporary
Palimpsests. Each painting bears the name of the location or experience
from which it draws its source.
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