约瑟·帕拉

José Parlá (born 1973 in Miami, Florida) is a Cuban-American contemporary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Parlá creates paintings and multidisciplinary works inspired by his interest in memory, identity, migration, and the passage of time through the visual language of accumulated urban surfaces. Critics have interpreted these techniques as engaging with questions of language, politics and the meaning of place and public space.

Parlá’s approach to mark-making is both physical and textural, integrating bodily gestures into a painterly stream of consciousness that features areas of addition, erasure, and layering, questioning the status quo of visual culture. Parlá is publicly known for his permanent installations of large-scale paintings. In 2013 he painted the mural Nature of Language at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University, the mural Diary of Brooklyn at the Barclays Center, and a 90-foot mural ONE: Union of the Senses in the lobby of One World Trade Center. He later completed Amistad América (2018) at the University of Texas at Austin, a large-scale mural commissioned for Robert B. Rowling Hall as part of the university’s Landmarks public art program.

Parlá constructs his paintings improvisationally by layering materials. He said, "I’m really interested in the way our lives are built up out of memory and history, and how we reflect that in our surroundings." He has exhibited worldwide and collaborated with artists from various countries. In 2012, he worked with French artist JR on a piece titled "Wrinkles of the City: Havana", which in the same year was selected to be in the 11th Havana Biennial. As part of the collaboration, Parlá and JR co-directed a documentary by the same title and they were awarded the Grand Prize from Heartland Film Festival for the Best Documentary Short and Best U.S. Premiere Documentary Short in 2013.

Early life

José Parlá was born in Miami to Cuban immigrant parents. At just 10, he began painting art on walls in Miami, often signing his work with his writer's name "Ease". As a teenager, he became active in Miami's aerosal art scene and frequently collaborated with his brother, Rey Parlá. In 1992, the brothers alongside friend Chris Mendoza helped establish The Inkheads, a Miami-based aerosol art collective known for its collaborative approach to artmaking and documentation.

Parlá received a scholarship to Savannah College of Art & Design when he was 16, after a high school teacher noticed his talent. He later studied at Miami Dade Community College and New World School of the Arts.

He moved to the Bronx after his father died to established himself as an artist in New York, initially supporting himself by designing album covers and T-shirts for hip-hop artists including Gang Starr.

Career

Parlá's heavily layered paintings can often resemble distressed city walls. Writer Greg Tate wrote: "What José Parlá's paintings force us to realize, as good historical paintings always do, is that given enough time and entropy even the hurtling locomotive motion of the streets can be arrested, contemplated, symbolically apprehended, studied, replicated. The temptation to call Parlá a 'post-graffiti’ painter is great but I'd prefer we recognize him as a historical landscape painter even though his historical landscape is made of concrete, wood and wallboard and his 'histories' derive from personal memories and from events buried and embedded in the gorgeous erosions and ruination time and weather will deposit on your average urban walls." Parlá finds old posters from city streets, which he incorporates into his paintings to give a greater sense of place and create the impression of layers of posters papered over each other for generations. He paints over these with thick splashes of colour and abstract calligraphy, weaving lines connecting the works together, similarly to Cy Twombly's paintings from the 1950s. Each work attempts to describe the place where he is working. Exhibitions such as José Parlá: Segmented Realities (2015, High Museum of Art, Atlanta) recreate these walls in three dimensions.

Large scale murals

Parlá's first large-scale mural was for a Toronto housing development called City Place in 2010. In 2012, he painted a 70-foot long lobby mural titled Diary of Brooklyn for the Barclays Center, and a lobby painting titled Gesture Performing Dance, Dance Performing Gesture, for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Fisher Theater. Parlá worked on the two painting simultaneously, going back and forth between the two nearby buildings and working late.

In 2013, he painted the mural The Nature of Language for the newly constructed James B. Hunt Jr. Library at the North Carolina State University. In 2015 Parlá painted ONE: Union of the Senses which is displayed in the lobby of One World Trade Center, curated by Asher Edelman and Edelman Arts, appointed by the building developer. The painting measures 15 ft by 90 ft, and has been described as the largest painting in New York City.

In 2023, Parlá completed a public commission for the Far Rockaway Writer's Library in Queens, New York, a collaboration with the architecture firm Snøhetta.

Career summary

In 2011, Parlá was commissioned to paint two gigantic and highly detailed murals for the Parade1 building at Concord CityPlace in Toronto, Canada. The paintings titled The Names that Live But Sometimes Fade While Time Flies and The Bridge although abstract in nature- are filled with stories of different artists, which Parlá pays homage through calligraphic marks and gestures.

In 2012, Parlá was commissioned to create a site specific-piece for the inside of the EmblemHealth Dean entrance at the Barclays Centre. The piece titled, Diary of Brooklyn is inspired by the book Brooklyn Is by James Agee and is visible from the street, creating an interaction with the public. Also in 2012, Parlá completed his first large scale commissioned artwork titled Gesture Performing Dance, Dance Performing Gesture. According to Parlá, this 37 feet long by 7 feet tall mural located at The Brooklyn Academy Of Music serves as a "reminder that we are not passive bystanders; we are active participants in a world that our senses produce for us, from moment to moment."

原文较长，这里只摘了前面一部分，摘自英文维基百科「José Parlá」（暂时没有中文条目，下面是英文原文），按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用，去掉了参考文献、外部链接等尾部小节和表格，其余文字未作改动。