Dennis Hollingsworth

ArtNet on Aaron Parazette

The first review is in from Aaron Parazette's recent show:

Aaron Parazette (b. 1960) is a former surfer who has been showing his work in Houston for more than 15 years, but comes for the first time to New York at Marlborough Chelsea, in the last show at the gallery?s West 19th Street space before it relocates to a new building under construction on West 25th Street, next to Cheim & Read. The opening for the exhibition of Parazette?s new work brought out a sizeable crew of New York painters with their own Texas roots. What?s more, they all had exhibitions in New York galleries. It was like some kind of invasion.

In addition to Parazette, there wasJeff Elrod, whose computer-aided abstractions were on view at Fredericks & Freiser; Susie Rosmarin with her gingham TV-test-pattern Op Art paintings at Danese; and Giles Lyon with a series of intense, semi-Surrealist works done in Sumi ink on paper at Mixed Greens. (What?s more, Charles Cowles Gallery is currently presenting a show of works by a senior Texan sculptor, James Surls.)
Talk turned to various kinds of Texas dish -- the in-house confusion that reigned at the Menil Collection in the years after the death of founder Dominique de Menil, for instance, and the family feud that divides the Judd Foundation and the Chinati Foundation, the two institutions that Donald Judd set up in his will, one controlled by his kids and the other by his longtime girlfriend. Really, someone should write a book. Or maybe not.

As for Parazette?s paintings, they?re stylish and sharp signs -- literally, each work containing colored shapes and lines that spell out a simple word like Butter, Juice or Surf, the syncopated letters edged with pinstripes against monochrome grounds so that they hover at the threshold between abstraction and text. The illustrated catalogue has an essay by Mark Flood, still another Texas artist. The paintings are priced in the $7,000-$15,000 range, or thereabouts.