José Parlá
José Parlá
José Parlá (b. 1973) creates paintings and multidisciplinary works rooted in hybrid forms of abstract language. Born in Miami to Cuban immigrant parents and raised in Puerto Rico, Parlá grew up between the political and cultural currents of the Caribbean and the southern United States. He has described his upbringing as taking place in a "Cuban autonomous zone." Returning to Miami in the early 1980s, he absorbed the city’s burgeoning hip hop culture, which later energized his visual language. He studied painting at Savannah College of Art and Design and continued at New World School of the Arts and Miami Dade College.
Parlá’s practice is a layered, time based methodology that fuses writing and abstract expressionism. He builds palimpsest like paintings and installations through cycles of addition, subtraction and erasure. Calligraphic marks surface and recede while pasted fragments of posters and billboards embed into textured, wall like canvases. These works form a new kind of landscape, psycho-geographic terrains where language becomes topography and layers read as social and geological history.