Nara Roesler New York is pleased to present VOLUMENS, Rodolpho Parigi's first solo show in the US, which brings together around 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. In VOLUMENS, 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."
