About
Alexander Parlato is a painter living and working in Baltimore, MD.
Artist statement
Our online realities have made us accustomed to taking in diverse images and experiences spanning a wide emotional spectrum within a very short period of time. Truth and fiction blend as reality, propaganda, desire, fear, love, and disgust coalesce into neverending feeds and stories that require individuals to place their faith into one or more diverging narratives.
My current body of work seeks to explore the spaces between images consumed, generated, and recalled through juxtapositions and fragmentation.
While the final paintings I create are done exclusively in oils, my process most often begins by collecting images. Using personal images as well as those found on the internet, I assemble a haphazard, stream-of-consciousness collage as a reference for starting the painting. This process of collage is meant to expose these juxtapositions, but is used only as reference material for the final painted works, which, in their use of oils, relate themselves to the long history of painting as a means to depict and understand the human experience.