Escape Velocity
Dellamarie Parrilli: A Life in Technicolor
KTC AFFILIATED ARTISTS, on view thru December 31, 2023
There’s a certain magic in the rigor of difficult paintings, which leads us down cul-de-sacs of aesthetic ferment. The specific paintings of Dellamarie Parrilli manifest visual complexity in agendas of depictive symmetry. They are a cumulative formal event in which seeing is believing. Parrilli builds her paintings in gestures, alternating the quality of line, the interior depth, and the scale. Much has been written appreciatively about her use of color, but this is just one aspect, that decorates their overt faces. It’s easy to let them charm us, when what they really achieve is a matter of mark making, visual depth, and chromatic rendering. Cumulatively they alternate to build aesthetic tension. Moving through her work we have to rediscover how these aspects are successfully achieved, and we must reconsider where they place us aesthetically, which is to say spiritually and metaphysically.
Parrilli has been painting in this, her style or her vision, since 2001, when a health issue caused her to pivot in her original career from vocal performance on the stage, to visual art. She has been prodigious in her creativity, and has diverged often in modes and styles, scale and dimensions. Her work has the ambiguity of Joan Mitchell, the headiness of Helen Frankenthaler, and the tenacity of Lee Krasner. Though primarily self-taught, these historical examples support her own, which are more pragmatic and less theoretical. The sort of work Parrilli makes form narratives of direct encounter. She lives and makes in the present.
Parrilli takes us on a journey of looking. It’s less important to emphasize individual works, because cumulatively and alternately, they form a forest of ontology. She narrates the moves required of us. The strange additions to everyday reality that are embodied by Parrilli’s vision can do no less than shake up any established values that form the philosophical condition of the commonplace. Like modern art viewed for the first time in the Salons of yesteryear, her work inspires strong emotions that run the gamut from euphoria to dismay. It’s this sort of appeal that makes them by necessity radical. They are by turns festive, moody, visceral, verdant, reflective, messy, graceful, and many other kinds of experiences. You look at her paintings, and decide where what they say places you. The quality and context of her painterly engagement, as a process, ultimately alters consciousness. By them we are not merely cajoled or convinced, but are made anew.
DAVID GIBSON is a freelance writer in the arts. He is available to write essays for monographs, exhibition catalogs, text for web sites, grant and residency applications, and to provide critical thinking in matters of portfolio development, studio practice, and professional etiquette. He can be contacted at davidgibsonwriting@gmail.com