That Red Bell Pepper Life
by Parra
2014
Acrylic on canvas
39.4” x 39.4” (100 x 100cm)
Parra
Same Old Song
New Paintings and Drawings
Opening Saturday, June 28th, 7 – 10pm
Please RSVP at rsvp@hvw8.com
The works in Same Old Song are overturned wine glasses, leisure-suited perverts, and behind-the-bar-booty slaps arranged in compositions of red, white, blue, pink, Ben-Day dots, and stars. In all its orgiastic fervor, his work is foremost graphic in character: tightly controlled compositions, highly saturated colors, flood-filled silhouettes, flatness, and hard edges that are hallmarks of the comic tradition that Lichtenstein had notoriously usurped to conflate the proverbial high-and-low strata of the 1960s Pop movement.
While Lichtenstein’s early production was made for the gallery, Parra had his start in flyers, posters, and other media of advertorial nature. His works are visual literalizations of a dirty punchline. Sometimes they are art referential; other times they seem to be purely profane, both harmlessly witty and uncomfortably politically incorrect. When asked why he uses his trademark beaked humanoids, he claims that if he drew human faces, the figure becomes too familiar. Generalizations and types are more truthful than the personal.
Parra once described his work as “fast and freestyle” with an intent to un-complicate, purposefully limiting himself to a small color palette. This simplification makes his work all the more viral it has the ability to travel through pervasive and accessible channels. Whether it¹s democratizing or artlessly commercial is a question already beat to exhaustion by Pop and Post-modern. Parra doesn¹t care. His is an example of the strength of graphic design. It shamelessly hijacks commercial systems of circulation and is propagated with both compositional sophistication and crudeness like a silk-gloved bitchslap, a force that gains institutional recognition incidentally, without solicitation. A commercial illustrator doesn’t just earn international gallery exhibitions in major art centers and murals in cultural institutions such as SF MOMA and MOCA without at least some published critical endorsement from an academic.
Parra is a graphic artist, designer, and musician living and working in Amsterdam. He has recently exhibited in New York, Antwerp, Cologne, San Francisco, and Tokyo. Same Old Song is his fifth solo exhibition at HVW8 Gallery.