|
James Parenti is a Chicago-based artist. He is a graduate of the Fine and Applied Arts school at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and has been working in Chicago since 1999. The work presented on this site is a sampling of past & current projects.
Statement on The "Bubble" Paintings and Other Work
The fractured image. It is the single most common theme in art in the past century so. Picasso, of course, is identified with the core concept - cubism - but it has continued to evolve in a number of different directions ever since. I‘ve long admired artists like Chuck Close and David Hockney for their approach to image-making, in which they’ve taken the original idea of Cubism and suffused it with the technical innovations of their own time.
In Hockney’s case I’m referring to his Polaroid “joiner” pieces and his colorful representations of the California landscape. In the case of the Polaroid pieces, the undulating ‘pieces’ of the figure as represented in each individual photograph of the subject give the larger work a real painterly quality. The landscape paintings, in which the subjects are composed in swaying, circulating patterns and lines, convey a sense size and space.
The same goes for Chuck Close. His enlarged, grid-divided portraits make the portraits he does into something that is in a way inhuman but really quite beautiful as a painting and certainly no less impressive than the work of Hockney and others. Both of these artists and their contemporaries have an intuitive understanding of what makes images intriguing in an world full of constantly-evolving imaging technology.
My paintings, like the work of Hockney and Close, reflect early 20th century Cubism, albeit with the obvious exception of circular rather than angular fragmentation. Like these two painters and others, my work stays current in that it has more of a focus on photographic effect.
Perhaps unlike these artists, though – at least to an extent - I focus on subject matter of a more "classic" origin. The subjects in the bubble paintings and their successive "blurred" paintings are simple and uncomplicated. I use straightforward bust portraits or classic figure poses. The palette leans toward lush, warm colors, and the composition of both the subjects and the circles is meant to emulate Baroque period paintings.
This stylistic bent intersects with my experience working in commercial graphic design and photography. Years of doing both have spurred me to move toward imagery that's not only photographic in nature, but also reminiscent of popular photo-editing software. In a sense, the work I admire by the aforementioned artists was a precursor to some of the standard practices of contemporary commercial design that I rely upon doing to make a living.
The subject matter I enjoy making into fine art, however, is based around a stylistic era that predates all of this innovation, including Cubism. So, in a sense, the old meets the new meets the old again.
I feel that it’s important to make images for one’s own time. By making the familiar and universal image of the human form incomplete by way of fragmentation or subtle blurs, I’m enticing the audience to "fill in" the remainder of that which they recognize in the image. This creates a dynamic interaction between art and viewer that’s appropriate for our own stylistic era.
This, of course, isn't the only type of painting I do. There are pieces I've made and continue to make which are more expressive and emotionally charged and don't incorporate the "bubble" look, and I’ll inevitably focus on that again. For now, though, the work I’m doing is satisfying in that it presents a technical challenge that I can use to further enhance my abilities as a painter. It also allows me to explore the concept of making something that’s beautiful in a classical sense without sacrificing the ability to emulate the contemporary innovations that I continue to be fascinated by.
|
|
