José Parlá: ENGRAMS | Ben Brown Fine Arts
An engram is the physical trace a memory leaves in the brain. US-born painter José Parlá based his new show at Ben Brown Fine Arts around that concept. Each work slyly inverts the en plein air tradition of the Impressionists, who stood around for hours in nature and tried to capture what they saw.
Instead, Parlá goes somewhere and sees something once, goes home and tries to recreate it. The final works are overlaid with loops, circuits and swirls of acrylic paint - meant to suggest neural or other corporeal networks. The places he visited include a wall in New York. A forest in Japan. A Havana sunset.
Infinite Mnemonic Horizon (2026)
As I’ve written before, though, I’ve never been a huge fan of artists who need to explain the concept behind their works in order for them to be enjoyed. The pleasure I took from this show came from the aesthetic appeal of many of the works, rather than the artist’s conceit.
Well, from one work in particular: Infinite Mnemonic Horizon, pictured above. It’s one of those Havana sunsets. Its paint is crusty, built up in ridges that lap right to the edges of the frameless canvas.
Parlá writes: “With every stroke I record a life lived in transit: gestures become maps, and maps become the language of remembrance.” Fair enough. Last time I was at Ben Brown Fine Arts it was for Gavin Turk’s paintings of half-open doors. These were also paintings about escape, the elsewhere.
Parlá’s paintings are about elsewhere too, just filtered through the lag of memory rather than the moment of looking. Sometimes, luckily, that’s a memory of a pretty sunset.
José Parlá: ENGRAMS is at Ben Brown Fine Arts (London). 10 June - 31 July 2026