José Parlá: Engrams

An engram is the physical trace a memory leaves in the brain – a living, ever-shifting pattern that reactivates and reshapes itself each time it is recalled. By this understanding, memory is reconstruction rather than retrieval, and the act of remembering becomes a creative gesture in its own right – the principle that underpins the series.

Three landscapes inform this body of work: the radiant, expansive sunsets of Havana, Cuba; the dense, immersive greenery of the forests in Hakone, Japan; and the subterranean energy of New York City's urban corridors. Where Old Master painters have historically returned to the same landscape day after day, documenting the shifting subtleties of light through direct observation, Parlá inverted this practice. He visited each site only once, then painted from memory alone, allowing the act of remembering, with all its stretching, reconfiguring and transforming, to do the compositional work. As he puts it, "by activating the same memory repeatedly, the accuracy of the image progressively starts dissolving, allowing doors of genuine imagination to swing open."

ENGRAMS is the first iteration of a broader investigation of the same name – an acronym for Exploring Neighborhoods, Gestures, Archived Memory Spaces. The research is being developed during Parlá's current residency at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute, where he is this year's Alan Kanzer Artist Resident, and forms part of his ongoing exploration of the dialogue between art and neuroscience.