José Parlá: Walls, Diaries, and Paintings

Parlá's paintings read as walls: layered, scarred, written over and washed out, and this monograph is the first full account of how a private script came to carry the memory of whole cities.

Published by Hatje Cantz in 2011 to accompany the exhibition of the same title at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York, the volume surveys two decades of work in some 131 illustrations. Parlá builds his surfaces from plaster, collaged posters, homemade inks, acrylic, oil and enamel spray paint, using fresco techniques to age them, then cuts them with a looping calligraphy that stops short of legibility. Essays by Isolde Brielmaier, Greg Tate and Michael Betancourt situate the work between painting, graffiti and documentary; the book was designed by Jutta Herden.

Born in Miami in 1973 to Cuban parents, Parlá began in the graffiti culture of the 1980s and has since drawn material from Havana, London, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Brooklyn, where he lives and works. He acts as a historical transcriber as much as a painter, and his later large-scale commissions extend the same argument about how cities record themselves.