Hello all! I have a MINT José Parlá 'Layered Days' Book from the 2008 Exhibit.(I have also included the original write up about the show at the bottom of this posting)
Has DOUBLE Parlá love..was blessed to get a small piece done on the cover as-well as him sign the inside.
$200USD or possible trades. Hit my inbox!
cdn image serverJosé Parlá: Layered Days
By Joan Waltemath
December 2009
Cristina Grajales, Inc. November 8 – December 20th, 2008
The antipode of Babel.
José Parlá’s first New York solo exhibition is on the fourth floor of an old Soho loft building; a
manually operated freight elevator takes you up to a space that has been cleared of its usual offering
of furniture to make room for his paintings, works on paper and ceramics.
Installation view “Layered Days” José Parlá at Cristina Grajales, Inc. Left “Taganga, Colombia” 2008, 6’×6’, oil, acrylic, ink, enamel, collage,
polyurethane and plaster on canvas. Right: “All City Din”, 2008 6’ × 6’, oil, acrylic, ink, enamel, and plaster on canvas
Parlá began his career writing on the streets of Miami, with the occasional jaunt up to New York City
to join in what was going on in the boroughs at the height of the graffiti movement. “Soho, Manhattan,
Circa 1981,” a four-by-six-foot canvas painted in 2008, acknowledges the “old school” writers Parlá
was too young to truly be part of, yet from whom he nevertheless learned volumes as he watched their
forays into the commercial art world of the 80s. To his credit, Parlá concentrated 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.
In “Reverberations of Yajé,” like many of Parlá’s works, we tend to read a group of calligraphic lines,
hovering at the top of the painting, from right to left like Arabic or Hebrew, yet it is unclear whether
they could actually be read by a native speaker or are a recreation of the style. Below these marks, a
vast space opens up, and with the awareness that these pieces were painted as reflections of Parlá’s
recent journey to the Colombian jungle, the color and forms fall into place as part of an extended
undergrowth with the calligraphic marks serving as a canopy. Time serves to open up the volumes
in Parlá’s work, and after a while you can believe you’re hearing the sounds of birds as the world
outside this 6’ × 12’ canvas falls away.
Another piece in this exhibition, “Taganga, Colombia,” relates to the Colombia journey, though this
one, like most of the others, is in response to an urban condition. Parlá not only photographs the
layered graffiticovered walls in his neighborhoods, but has photographed walls in China, Hong Kong,
Tibet, and Cuba as well. These images serve both as notebook and inspiration for his larger works,
which tend to recreate the palimpsest of the billboard or other urban surfaces as a tabula rasa for his
mark making.
“Layered Days,” the title piece of the show, does well to capture the density of contemporary life,
the manifold connections and multiple agendas that make up any given day. Like many of Parlá’s
paintings, the space that opens up in them is underneath—a hesitant reality that hovers below the
surface, partly visible and partly not. The surfaces are by turns matte and reminiscent of Tapies, and
then gritty with a sheen that speaks of the layers of grime we live in and around. Parlá celebrates the
least intervention of the human touch.
On the far wall of the Soho space Parlá has constructed an altar in honor of his ancestors. Using
photographs and paintings, memorabilia and drawings, Parlá makes it clear that he sees his project
as part of something larger than an individual artist’s drive to become marketable. He takes image
after image of his ancestors, some serious, some hilarious, and enshrines them on the wall together
with some African sculptures and vases he made recently in Italy. They weave a context for Parlá’s
movements, tracing his family history from Lebanon to Cuba to the US and now, with José and his
brother Rey’s Grand Tour of China and Tibet, the Far East.
One might be inclined to think of Mark Tobey or Cy Twombly when looking at Parlá’s work, but
the relationship is more one of a common source of inspiration than any actual link between the
artists’ works. Starting from his broad, sweeping, tagging gestures, Parlá has dug into history and
familiarized himself with the traditions of calligraphy from Asia to the Middle East. While Parlá’s
gesture hovers on the edge of communicability as an understandable language, it raises the question
of whether the visual or written language will take precedence. One feels his need to get to the
bottom of things, to touch the origins of our impulse towards mark making—an impulse that lies at
the root of both the line and the calligraphic gesture.
Tracing things back to their point of origin also enables Parlá to project forward, with a look at the
similarities underlying various calligraphic scripts and their common ground among young graffiti
writers around the world—who all speak the same language with their tags. After the pieces had
a chance to unfold, I began to sense that they are cast in a future tense. It is as if Parlá is already
speaking of a time when all the languages of Babel will return to one. His utter confidence and
bravado in writing this universal script are almost enough to convince one of the possibility of its
occurrence.
