From Brooklyn to L.A.

By: Amanda Cogswell | August 19, 2011 | Art

After his innovative exhibition last spring at New York’s Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, Brooklyn-based artist José Parlá is ready to invade the West Coast.  Taking inspiration from his roots in Miami street art and world travels, Parlá’s work is a modern take on abstract expressionism.  Through his use of layering, erasure, calligraphy, and graffiti, he’s able to create highly complex visual narratives that evoke the beautiful history of decaying city walls.  Malibu Magazine recently caught up with the artist to talk about his new exhibition Character Gestures, opening at OHWOW LA on September 9 and continuing through October 22, 2011.

What drove you to become an artist?
What drives me to be an artist, the same as it was in the beginning, is a strong passion for drawing, painting, and using my imagination to make art and employ concepts that are relevant to what is going on in my life.  I’ve always had the impulse to document my experiences.

What inspires your art?
This is ever evolving as I walk through life.  Many things inspire my work: family, travel, books, friends, lovers, space, paint, materials, walls, music, design, architecture, personalities, films, photography, nature, technology, politics, psychology, migration, history, pain… the sources for my inspiration are endless.

What do you hope people experience from your pieces?
My practice is largely about self-reflection, so I guess each work is a mirror.  Anyone should be able to relate to the work and imagine his or her own life inside my abstractions.  The work is meant be emotive and interpreted through the viewer’s own set of experiences.

What is your creative process when you start work on a new piece?
Each piece begins differently, though I sometimes revisit the beginning process of older works to experiment with new directions.  The paintings are very dense and layered, so each is created by applying paint on top of paint, sometimes by applying paint with transparencies of color, collage, and experimental mixed media techniques of my own creation.

Your recent works have involved a lot of work with textures, bright colors and media.  What evoked these choices?
The choices to make the textured, layered works are evoked by memories from different periods of my life.  Some memories are from when I was growing up painting on walls, a period that is very special to me and deeply embedded in my DNA.  Some are from my days at art college, and some are from family experiences, like birth, trips, and death.  But memory, like history, is personal so I choose to reinterpret my life experiences in an abstract narrative.  The visual communication that I’m after is chaotic in the sense that all the things I consider to be real or concrete can still somehow remain partly mysterious or unexplainable, even if that thing is understandable.  In a way, I combine periods of my memory to others because it’s what I’m thinking in the moment while painting.  The din of my life inspires the work.  All the choices being made are a way to guarantee my own sanity.

Who do you admire most and why?
The person I admire most is my mother for her pure, unconditional love.

How do your own life experiences influence and intertwine with your art?
My art is journalistic in every sense of the word.  Many layers of my paintings are lines of text about my daily experience and memory.  Anything from my travels to an experience with history, or from a broken heart to a random thought, is partly transcribed in my work.  Everything is an influence – the good and the bad.

How did you formulate the idea for Character Gestures?
Character Gestures is an idea I’ve been thinking about for a few years.  One afternoon, while speaking to my brother about the new works in the studio, I explained how I felt that the writing marks in the work, or the gestural impressions, could have been made by anyone.  For example, if one of my paintings is on a wall outside somewhere, any pedestrian could walk by and express something on it.  He could tear a poster or glue one up, or he could write, burn, and damage what’s there.  Perhaps he could paint something beautiful and write a poem on it.  It’s then a gesture made by a character in life.  From a young age, I spent much time walking around cities, observing what people do to walls.

But in the case of my work, the character is from my imagination.  The many people in my memories have now become the character roles I play when making my work.  I could be a homeless Vietnam veteran asking for change and writing on the wall, or a political activist with a spray can, or a writer painting his name on the wall for fame.  There’s a kind of theatre to this new concept, which functions as a double entendre because the word “character” also refers to the letterforms making words within my own calligraphic drawings.

Where do you do most of your work?  Does your environment affect the final product?
Most of my work is made in my Brooklyn studio, but I often have the opportunity to work in other cities.  This is generally a very valued change of pace because not only does the environment and local culture influence me, but also the range of accessible materials affects the physical making and composition of the works.

How has your work evolved from where you began to where you are now?
The most obvious evolution is in its color, texture, and line quality.  My work has gone through many phases of discovery, mostly through experimentation with the physical action of making the pieces combined with ideas and concepts.  I learn new things in the studio each day.

OHWOW LA - 937 N. La Cienega Blvd.  Los Angeles, CA 90069

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