Alejandro Marín Parisi is an Argentine painter based in Paris whose work expands the definition of painting into a multifaceted and multimedia practice.
Texture plays a crucial role in his canvases. Working primarily in large format, he reappropriates collected components, weaving them into layered compositions. He joins memory, observation, and citations to create material cohesion. Layers of paint, collage, and mark-making accumulate into dense surfaces. This tension between revelation and obscurity presents painting as a site of discovery and an opportunity for the viewer to challenge preconceptions. Pages from notebooks, museum sketches, shopping lists, or casual drawings are folded into his paintings, creating works that feel at once archival as well as spontaneous.
Reminiscent of both impressionism and expressionism, Parisi’s work has strong roots in the simple but emotive combination of gesture and colour. Like many other works in the show, his pieces hover in an unfamiliar space between figuration and abstraction. In this way, his paintings invite the viewer into a dialogue about uncertain polarities; including intuition versus structure, personal and the historical, and quotodian versus monumental. Forms emerge as quickly as they dissolve, suggesting that identity is neither fixed nor certain, but always in motion and always up for negotiation.
Beyond the canvas, Parisi extends his practice into ceramics, books, and workshops. This parallel research emphasises painting as a starting point that is informed by diverse encounters and collaborations. His work ultimately gestures toward painting as an evolving language that is capable of holding the fleeting impressions and enduring complexities of contemporary experience, but only if it remains unfixed and experimental.
For Parisi, painting is less about producing a finished statement than sustaining an ongoing conversation between material, history, and the ever-shifting societal gaze. The exhibition marks a return to oil painting, which Parisi revisits for the first time since leaving Argentina over a decade ago.