NEW YORK, NY.- For centuries, painters have envisioned ways to grasp life’s fleeting qualities through their art. The ancient word used to refer to a painter was Zoographos, which stresses the graphic depiction of the living, naming the one who “draws life”. There is no better illustration of such a defying challenge than the anecdote that Seneca reports in his Controversies whereby Parrhasius, painting the portrait of dying Prometheus, subjects a slave to torture in order to grasp the reality of the scene. “I am dying, Parrhasius” the poor man muttered, fainting, while the painter pleaded: “Stay like that. Stay like that.”

That is the scene of painting as aporia, the contradictory recollection of portraiture as execution, as an inevitable passage from life to death.

Rodolpho Parigi’s sparkling and virtuoso-like paintings, baroque and deliberately over-the-top, exude as much queerness as they do art historical wisdom. They are a case in point: fearless of the artificiality of painting, Parigi ceaselessly pursues the bursting of life, the blast of physis. This is the reason why, while flashy on the surface and in the depicted accumulation of reflective surfaces, Parigi’s oeuvre is also profoundly serious in its structural complexity, its mastery of execution, and its multilayered art historical implications.

VOLUMENS thus seems a fitting title for the show, as the roundness and colorful density of shapes -both still and dynamic- in these compositions are subjects for the demonstration of painting, as an art, and as a technique, emphatically pointing towards the historical markers of the art of painting itself -mirrors and mirroring surfaces, lights, resplendent colors, serpentine figures. Each tableau made by Parigi is therefore a statement of self-reflection, an affirmation that the essential subject of painting is painting itself.

Rodolpho Parigi’s work recurrently includes a signature- like figure, a human body vested in a shining latex costume. Often seen as a statement on queerness, this figure is also as is the old Prometheus, a body subjected–if in a pleasurable way– to vestmental constraints. One might think that it is an allegory of painting itself, for what is painting if not the art of embracing bodies in their reflection, held within the surface of pigments, like Narcissus frozen in his own image?

Shrouded in latex, among these paintings, attentive beholders can also find the first modern nymph, the naked luncheon’s character by Manet metamorphosed as Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporu, its Brazilian after-life, and equally wrapped in the shining blackness of rubber, nearby, Parigi’s forms recall the sculptures by Maria Martins, the pioneer of Brazilian surrealism.

One hundred years after the Surrealist manifesto, Parigi’s oneiric bacchanals of forms and colors bear testimony to the enduring legacy of the surreal movement. ‘So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life -real life, I mean- that in the end this belief is lost”, as André Breton wrote at the beginning of his manifesto in 1924. Parigi’s work features an ultimate vitalist impulsion by courageously facing the aporia of painting, its zoographic challenge, and its destiny to being the ultimate artifice representing life.

VOLUMENS –the exhibition– speaks volumes on painting and the art history of bodies and dreams. At stake in each of these works is the willful manifestation of the artificiality of painting, the inevitable dryness of its imaginary wholeness –as paint is always a liquid that dries– as much as the unstoppable plasticity of its figural potency, the gluon-like fluidity of its shaping figures, its protean metamorphosis.