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Email PageAll On Up
April 19, 2006- May 27, 2006
Aaron Parazette
Marlborough Chelsea
545 W 25th St Aaron Parazette Aggro (2006) |  Aaron Parazette Jet (2006) |
The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce the New York debut of work by Houston-based painter Aaron Parazette. The exhibition will be on view at Marlborough Chelsea, 211 West 19th Street, New York, from April 19 through May 20, 2006. Parazette’s recent works are comprised of hard-edge letters that spell out a word taken from surfer lexicon. The title of the exhibition, All on Up, is itself a surfer term meaning “everything’s great.” In beginning a work, Parazette selects a term and then uses a computer to elongate, bend, shift and layer the letters until they coalesce into a complex composition that renders the text nearly indecipherable. As Frances Colpitt wrote in her Art in America review of Parazette’s 2004 exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston: “Once the jumbled and interlaced letters are deciphered, the viewer comes to realize that the paintings are no more about surfing than [Frank] Stella's protractor paintings of the 60’s are about drafting tools or [Ed] Ruscha’s 1962 painting Spam (Actual Size) is about lunch meat.” While the surfer jargon loosely unites the work as a series, that common element has little to do with the paintings’ content. Rather, Parazette can best be considered an abstract painter who employs text as a purely compositional structure upon which to “hang the paint.” A masterful colorist, Parazette’s work is extremely graphic and vivid in nature. However, to truly appreciate the work, it must be seen in person. Only then can the viewer become fully aware of the pristine surfaces and extreme precision of these hard-edge works. In her review, Colpitt praised “Parazette’s bold palette of artificial-seeming colors reminiscent of plastic, his precise rendering of form and the emphatic presence of each painting.” Parazette was born in 1960 and grew up in coastal Southern California, where he developed his ongoing passion for surfing. After receiving an MFA in 1990 from Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA, he relocated to Houston. He is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at the University of Houston. Among the institutions in which Parazette has shown are the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, North Carolina. He was the recipient of a 2004 Artadia Fund for Art and Dialogue Award and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Award in 1994. A fully illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Mark Flood, will be available at the time of the exhibition. An opening reception for the artist will be held at Marlborough Chelsea on Wednesday, April 19, 2006, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. The gallery is located at 211 West 19th Street, New York, New York. Regular gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 5:30 pm.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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