Aaron Parazette at Texas - Houston, Texas - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Among the greatest in quantity admired young painters on Houston's vigorous art sight Aaron Parazette showed seven of recent origin works in his second solo exhibition at Texas Gallery. While Parazette's technique of rendering discrete sections of an interlocking pattern with thick oil enamel has not changed a great deal of his newfound confidence in paint-handling is accompanied by the agency of a fresh palette and an energized vocabulary of forms.

With the exception of Color lock opener (1997), a tall, lanky stripe painting, all of the works in the exhibition were based upon clip-art images of splashes and splats. Greatly enlarged, they are layered to have possession of the whole space of the canvas and to propose a complex interaction of figure and turf The titles are derived from those of Abstract-Expressionist works that were included in "The novel American Painting," an exhibition which toured Europe in 1958-59 and they signal Parazette's interest in the unrehearsed gesturing as a sign of impassioned expression.

His paintings are large in scale -- 75 or 84 inches square -- and the splatters range from a paw wide to nearly the entire width of the canvas. As of that kind they are practically impossible to imagine as action s at least in the Abstract-Expressionist faculty of perception The graceful drips and splashes of Pollock or de Kooning, which signify spontaneous physical motion of the arm and material part are magnified and transformed into independent shapes in Parazette's work, where they can alone be read as painted representations of spontaneity.

The earliest work in the exhibition, Je T'Aime Number 3 with Loaf of Bread (1996) is a relational composition. Juxtaposed and overlapping shapes show an illusion of space in the manner of Cezanne or de Kooning, thorough with a repousse figure (a bright r splash) at the lower left and receding forms in golden dark green, pink and ocher. Later works display a more audacious palette, with lime virid juxtaposed to orange, or army verdant next to lilac. Along with blue-violet, white, ocher and black, Beggar's rapture (1996) features the once fashionable decorator colors of pink and turquoise, as intense as a just-painted Southwestern condo.

Beggar's beatitude and the three works from 1997 engross a concentric composition. February, the greatest in quantity optically dynamic painting in the exhibition, consists of whorls of chartreuse, black, white and multiple sapphirines that seem to spin counter-clockwise on the outside from the center. The undulating, toothy shapes are filled in by the agency of barely visible brushwork, producing a luscious satin surface. Utterly seductive, Parazette's exhibition had no derange living up to its title, "Pleasure Provision."

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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