The paintings of Carolanna Parlato fuse her signature material: thick fluid acrylic pours with brushstrokes and pools of thinner paint. While open to multiple associations and varied interpretations – colliding storm fronts or clashing ocean currents – the work remains fundamentally abstract.
“Intuition and chance are an essential part of my painting practice. I drip, brush, smear and pour fluid paint to create an abstraction which is a visual metaphor for fluidity. Nature’s forms and colors fascinate me. My paintings shimmer with movement and vibrant color. Toxic greens and acid yellows lifted from pop-culture fuse with earthy greens and heavenly blues. For me, abstraction is a form of meditation on our ever-changing perceptions of the natural world.”
In the catalogue essay for Parlato’s exhibition at the Elizabeth Harris gallery in NYC, Charlotta Kotik writes:?”There is more than a trace of the romantic sensibility in Parlato’s colorful abstractions. They are lush and expressive, full of fantasy and hidden mysteries. Inherently dramatic they often point toward the exalted dynamism of baroque sensitivity. ……. Fully dedicated to painting, yet subverting its principles of flatness and containment, Parlato repeatedly demonstrates that this venerable medium, periodically proclaimed “dead”, has an inexhaustible capacity for renewal, transcendence and beauty.”
A leading proponent of painterly process abstraction, Carolanna Parlato has exhibited her work widely in New York and nationally. She was born in Brooklyn and received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Parlato has been written about in Art in America, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Brooklyn Rail and the New York Sun. Solo exhibitions of her paintings have been shown at the Islip Art Museum OH+T Gallery (Boston), the Phatory (NYC) and Elizabeth Harris Gallery in NYC. Recently, her work was included in “Material Color” at the Hunterdon Art Museum, and in “Kuf-Mold” an exhibition originating in Istanbul that travelled to Ghent, Belgium and Rotterdam. She has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions including “Open House” at the Brooklyn Museum, “Splat” at the Sabina Lee Gallery (Los Angeles), Sandroni Rey (Los Angeles), Amy Simon Fine Art (Westport, CT), OH+T Gallery (Boston), White Box (NY), Schroeder/Romero and Cristinerose galleries (NY). Parlato’s paintings are represented in many private and public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Francis Greenberger Collection, Islip Art Museum, Reader’s Digest, and P?zer Inc. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Website
http://www.carolannaparlato.com/
