José Parlá ‘Mirrors’

“I am interested in discovering and assimilating the overlooked deteriorated layers of advertising on walls fading and withering in the sun. I see the writing on the wall and the storied layers of paint as the psychology of society”.

– José Parlá – Brooklyn, NY

Brand New Gallery is pleased and thrilled to present “Mirrors” the first solo exhibition by José Parlá at the gallery.

In Mirrors, Parlá creates a new series of paintings that reinvent the cityscape by exporting parts of walls he found in Italy to his Brooklyn studio in order to create work that interplays and re-contextualizes detritus appropriated and presented as objet trouvé in both abstract paintings and poetic interpretations of places seen by the artist’s eye.

Parlá collected ripped posters he has applied to his work as collage that will be returned to their country of origin using his paintings as the vessels translating his journey from Milan to Rome, Napoli, Matera, Bari, Lecce and Bologna. In these works, Parlá reflects on memories from his travels and imports them back to Italy as carriers of new meaning.

In this exhibition José Parlá pays homage to several artists such as Mimmo Rotella, Isidore Isou, Tristan Tzara, and Burhan Dogançay, and art movements that are close in relation to his practice: New Realism and Lettrism. With these new works Parlá continues to examine ways of how his own art making process over the years has incorporated; writing, texture, collage and Metagraphics with what the Romanian artist and founder of the Lettrist movement Isidore Isou defined as: “[…] encompassing all the means of ideographic, lexical and phonetic notation, supplements the means of expression based on sound by adding a specifically plastic dimension, a visual facet which is irreducible and escapes oral labelling.”

By working in this tradition Parlá captures a ‘visual phonetic poetry’ throughout his art. Isou’s right hand man, Maurice Lemaître, a Lettrist theorist, added that Hypergraphics is an “ensemble of signs capable of transmitting the reality served by the consciousness more exactly than all the former fragmentary and partial practices.”

Brand New Gallery (pess release)