E X T R E M E S
Exhibition Dates: Jan 9 – March 7, 2020
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 23, 6-8pm
In the Project Space:
REY PARLA - EXTREMES
Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce EXTREMES, a new body of works by Brooklyn-based artist Rey Parlá.
This exhibition is a continuation and expansion of defining new photography without limits through improvisational compositions. The study of line, luminosity, abstraction, self-examination, concrete, pictorial conditions, and their possibilities are further explored in EXTREMES. The sensuous and luminous photographs here are objects presented – they only represent themselves and not the natural world. The works are pictures of the evolution of photography.
The focus of his imagery is guided in the intuitive process that gives birth to a personal concrete work formulated by introspection, improvisation, reflection, and links technology with Parlá's haptic human touch. This allows Parlá to arrange and design works with "multiple compositions," a borderless and non-hierarchical universe, which can be rotated vertically or horizontally as desired – the focal point is up to the viewers, so that in this way they may better access the artist's system of choices. This series, in particular, is partly inspired by Cuban American artist Carmen Herrera's work, and Sanzo Wada's color theory book of the 1930s, a Japanese artist and kimono designer.
Originally trained as a filmmaker, Rey Parlá continues to defy categorization with interest in a variety of methods to produce abstract optical works that are multiple singularities of illusory creations. Inspired by experimental cinema, Parlá has captured movement in a kind of freeze-frame that vibrates with a hum of silent breaths. These elements are woven together into a forward-thinking fabric presented as one unit. At once elemental and sophisticated, historical, and freshly contemporary, rigorously analytical, and full of uncertainty, the show is much like the global atmosphere both politically and environmentally. The works are lyrical and precisely intense with an elegiac aesthetic awareness of a cosmic uniformity at war. Parlá's mind is concerned with the creation of images rather than with photography in the conventional sense; although he is not divorced from the natural world of documentation, he lives the life of an artist between the illusory and the real on a bridging hyphen of concrete thoughts.
Rey Parlá (b. 1971, Florida) earned a B.A. in English Literature and a Certificate in Film
Studies from Florida International University in 2007. Parlá is a Cuban-American visual artist
working in photography, painting, and filmmaking. He first received recognition for his
“motion-paintings” at the 12th Annual Miami International Film Festival and has
collaborated with performance artist Natasha Tsakos in Miami Beach, Vanessa Gocksch of
Intermundos, and Ralph Falcón of Murk Records. Critical theorist, filmmaker, and
collaborator Michael Betancourt, has written about Rey’s film work. Parlá has lectured at
Savannah College of Art & Design on experimental time-based media and photography.
Parlá’s work has been exhibited in New York City and Tokyo. His works are in various
international private collections including the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Collection.
For press and other inquiries, please email: info@benrubigallery.com
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6pm
Press Release.pdf
Rey Parla is a Cuban American artist born in Miami and raised partly in Puerto Rico. Parla studied filmmaking at the Alliance Film and Video Cooperative and earned a B.A. Interdisciplinary Studies at Florida International University .
Rey Parla’s “Scratch-Graph” images have their origin in a series of hand-painted films the artist made in the 1990s. Using motion picture stocks (sometimes with photographed subjects), Parla scratches, paints on, and collages images in a process that physicalizes and gives visual representation to the metamorphic effect of memory. Parla layers and destroys pieces of film which he ultimately processes into unique photographic prints, with intersecting lines that recall microchips as well as urban streetscapes running in counterpoint to amorphous blocks of color. Frenetic but also tightly controlled, these images dialogue with Bridget Riley’s stripe paintings as much as they do with Man Ray’s photographs, with Jean Dubuffet’s all-over technique as well as the abstract films of Stan Brakhage. The manipulation of the pictorial artifact questions the idea of what a photograph is and what it can represent, both of the physical universe and of the viewer’s gaze.
Parla has lectured at Savannah College of Art & Design. His short films and documentaries have screened at several films festivals, and his photography has been featured in Forbes, Brooklyn Rail, the New York Daily News, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Champ magazine, and Cultured magazine, and is part of several international private collections, including the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Collection.
Artist's C.V.
REY PARLA
Jan 9 - Mar 7, 2020