IN PARENTELA'S LIVING ROOM A MEETING BETWEEN JOHN GALLIANO AND SHIRLEY HORN IS A RANDOM AND FREQUENT HAPPENING. CARMEN HUST | ARTICULATE # 16 | JULY 2018
The Italian artist Claudio Parentela (1962) works in the attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable opposites, enemy, far, hostile elements, .... to approach them in unlikely ways to his infinite ways and knots. The transition from collage to photography is in his work necessary, inevitable, continuous and discontinuous, fluid and full of insurmountable and inevitable obstacles. The two ways chase, overlap, collide and cancel each other, in what he calls his mental blender. In Parentela’s living room a meeting between John Galliano and Shirley Horn, Aurobindo and Robert Crumb, Alexander McQueen and Cicciolina is a random and frequent happening. His drive of production feeds of anything; music, sounds, smells and of course people. Furthermore, Parentela is in love with literature and is also inspired by his garden, his travels, his friends.
Claudio Parentela is an illustrator, painter, photographer, mail- and digital artist, cartoonist, collagist, freelance journalist. Parentela is active since many years in the international contemporary art scene.
Totally and proudly autodidact projecting his stories from Catanzaro (IT). He’s collaborating with many different cinemas, art- and comic magazines and is fascinated with tarots, weird high & low fashion, extreme obscure experimental photography, along underground comics.
Parentela’s preferred media is that of black Indian ink and on paper. He has a history of 15 years painting only in black and white ink, dedicated to the infinite shades between the two (greyscales), resembling the infinite shades of the soul. He’s also drawn to the absolute contrast and battle between light and darkness.
Parentela works both by pre-thinking his projects but also works by intuition. To Claudio the necessity for creation is essential in order to coexist with the world, with life:
“The subject of my creations chooses me, and I choose the subject. In the moment, I never know where my travel will go, or where it started.”
To Parentela a good composition consists in bringing together opposing elements, to reconcile irreconcilable elements, adding eccentricity, originality, freedom and colored madness, drawing parallels to the works of Joel Peter Witkin and Tony Conrad.
This article is part of ARTICULATE #16. Check out the full release below