The series entitled Surface Body/Action Space marked a seminal moment in José Parlá’s career. Using paintings, sculpture, performance, and spatial engagement, the works focused on the body’s movement through urban space.

As a continuation of Parlá’s earlier explorations, the works investigate urban memory and identity by playing with layered surfaces, echoing the way city walls absorb and hide history through time. Parlà’s calligraphy hovers between his signature script-like abstraction and a new, more gestural style, that expresses movement. In accordance with the title, his paint strokes demonstrate painting as a physical act. Using his experience of working on city walls and drawing on personal and community histories, his works invite the onlooker to participate rather than observe. In an interview with Forbes he states that “The work purposefully has been inclusive of a visual language that can be part of everyone’s life”. Parlá advances in his multi-technique practise by using plaster, concrete and pigment to create a dynamic surface.

Part of the series includes his collection of sculptures Segmented Realities, which stood on the Standard High Line in New York while Surface Body/Action Space was on show. The works functioned as urban relics, toying with the meaning of ‘contemporary’ and ‘historic’. Having come from a diasporic family himself, the themes of displacement and gentrification often appear in his practise.