PRESENTATION: Rodolpho Parigi-Volumens

Rodolpho Parigi is part of a new generation of Brazilian artists who emerged in the early 2000s. The artist’s work lies in a liminal space between abstraction and figuration, entwining a series of references that range from the tradition of Art History, with particular emphasis on Rubens’ baroque corporeality, to graphic design, advertising, scientific illustrations, pop culture, anatomical planes, and music.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Nara Roesler Gallery Archive

Rodolpho Parigi operates with singular transfiguration anchored in a sense  of excess, whereby he consolidates fragments of extremely diverse images and forms, through the use of saturated and luminous color palettes that construct a futurist retro. The minutely controlled process of execution and compositional organization amount to an ornamental strategy that resists traditional plays on perspective and forbids the gaze from resting, leading  it to incessantly roam the canvas. In Parigi’s paintings, the high tech present on the works’ thematic meets oil painting’s centenary virtuosity; while the organic merges with the artificial, creating an overall provocative sense of strangeness. Rodolpho Parigi in “Volumens”, his first solo exhibition in USA, presents 35 new paintings made over the last two years. The exhibition title refers to a pictorial element widely used in Parigi’s work throughout his career: elaborate volumes created in a two-dimensional medium, including paintings. This characteristic can be seen in the work of historical artists, who are considered references or inspiration for the artist, such as Pablo Picasso and Tarsila do Amaral (one of the leading figures in defining a Brazilian modernist tradition). In the exhibition, his works of vivid colors, malleable, and ambiguous forms resemble body parts, organs, biomorphic forms, and sculptural abstractions. Over the last year, the artist conceived the works presented in the show through the connections they establish with each other. Although volumetry is widely used in the paintings, the shapes that compose the elements represented have a certain malleability, as if they were metamorphosing. Thus, the paintings share similarities, whether thematic or formal, which shown together, highlight the artist’s poetic journey and the developments of his pictorial investigations. In Parigi’s words: “I draw and paint figures aiming to transfigure bodies and pre-established ideas, confusion of genres and the exploration of boundaries between real or simulated images. Bodies are fused and remodeled to transform the canvas or paper surfaces, where containments and expansions are negotiated within the physical limits of the support.” The exhibition includes references to artists and movements in art history, especially Surrealism, which celebrates its centenary this year. The ambiguity of the forms and their exuberant coloring give the compositions a dreamlike and absurd aspect, which is close to the proposals of the artistic avant-garde. Parigi points out that the development of the works was a kind of dive into his own subconscious: “My work emerges from the conflict between reality and fiction. Through drawings, paintings, and performances I explore a universe of self-imagined fiction, inhabited by hybrid or androgynous figures of strange beauty, forms that inhabit the surface like living bodies that could even breathe or move.” One hundred years after the Surrealist manifesto, Parigi’s oneiric bacchanals of forms and colors bear testimony to the enduring legacy of the surreal movement. ‘So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life -real life, I mean- that in the end this belief is lost”, as André Breton wrote at the beginning of his manifesto in 1924. Parigi’s work features an ultimate vitalist impulsion by courageously facing the aporia of painting, its zoographic challenge, and its destiny to being the ultimate artifice representing life.

Photo: Rodolpho Parigi, La Danse, 2018, oil paint on canvas 290 x 500 cm, 114.2 x 196.9 in, © Rodolpho Parigi, Courtesy the artist and Nara Roesler Gallery

Info: Nara Roesler Gallery, 511 west 21st street, New York, USA, Duration: 2/5-1/6/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://nararoesler.art/