José Parla, Home Away from Home

 Morning Blossoms Over Tokyo, (Multiversal), 2025, 6 x 16 feet x 2.5 inches, acrylic, oil paint, plaster and collage on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist.

By EMANN ODUFU August 2, 2025

Japan is a country characterized by polarities, caught in a perpetual dance between tradition and futurity, and trapped in a liminal space that is a fusion of both. This relationship with itself is best categorized in the extreme cultural disparities of two of its most well-known cities, Tokyo and Kyoto; their spellings are almost anagrams of one another, yet each pulses with a radically different cultural heartbeat. I first experienced Japan as a teenager, and remember how intrigued I was by how both cities felt like time machines, but seemingly moving in opposite directions. It makes sense that José Parla, a multidisciplinary artist whose layered abstractions function as “memory documents” would mirror this conceptual tension and the quality of duality inherent to the setting of his two part exhibition, Home Away from Home, currently on view in Tokyo at the Pola Museum Annex until July 27th and the gallery Kotaro Nukaga until August 9th.

Parlá’s practice explores the ever-evolving, yet paradoxically homeostatic nature of cities around the world, particularly those in which he has lived. In Parlá’s art, cities are complex adaptive systems, similar to living organisms that respond to internal and external changes while striving to maintain a distinct and rooted cultural identity. His painting Nippon (2013), created in response to the Tōhoku earthquake disaster, exemplifies this ethos. It offers a gesture of love and respect for Japan and its people, while honoring the resilience of cultural memory in the face of upheaval. Rather than focusing on the destruction, Parlá paints a quiet gesture of resilience, depicting a red circle rising from layers of texture and debris, a nod to both the Japanese flag and the process of a community in recovery. In this gesture, Parlá’s art becomes a demonstration of the emotional and physical terrain of rebuilding, and a testament to how art can hold space for collective healing, remembrance, and renewal.

Home Away from Home offers a transcultural archive of memory, rhythm, and ritual that speaks to the necessity of connection in an increasingly fragmented world. The dual exhibition features paintings and other works that Parlá created between 2001 and 2025, including some of his earliest paintings, which were exhibited in Japan and are now part of Japanese collections and are on loan for the duration of the show. In the process, the exhibition becomes a memory map of the evolution of his transnational friendships, collaborations, and influence. 

 Pola Museum Annex Home Away from Home, Jose Parla 
 

To see Home Away from Home completely, you must travel between two venues. This echoes Parlá’s life and practice, where travel is more than movement; it is a method. His layered works emerge through encounters across cities such as Havana, Miami, New York, and Tokyo. The act of moving between spaces becomes a metaphor for learning. A deeper understanding is born from journeying, cultural exchange, and witnessing the bridges between worlds. As Parlá says, his practice aims to create spaces that normalize "crossing borders, blending influences, and dreaming of a world where diverse ideas converge to create a collective horizon where truth, culture, and imagination set sail for new horizons."

For Parlá, painting is less about recording facts and more about capturing feelings. The works in Home Away from Home do not treat memory as a fixed entity. They embrace its fluid, sometimes fragmented nature. Parlá says, “Each experience I translate into paintings involves balancing abstracted ideas of reality. Memories are not always precise; they can fade, but feelings remain.” This emotional trace is evident in Island of Memory (2025) and Textured Strokes of Tokyo Memories (2025), evoking landscapes or city walls, bearing the trace of lived and retold stories. In Morning Blossoms Over Tokyo (Multiversal) (2025), soft sunrise tones wash over friends’ names, creating a warm tribute to connections and shared history. Its counterpart, Nocturnal Conversations, draws us into the night, capturing late-night talks, laughter, and dreamy moments in Tokyo. It is partly inspired by the surreal rhythms of Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance. Together, these works carry a quiet duality between day and night, clarity and haze, remembering and becoming. 

  Island of Memory, 2025, 4 x 7 feet x 2.5 inches acrylic paint and collage on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist.

In Architect of Pathways (2025), Parlá brings together two powerful spiritual figures from different parts of the world; Eleguá from the Yoruba tradition and Jizo from Japanese Buddhism. Both are guardians of the in-between; doorways, crossroads, and the spaces we pass through when we’re searching, grieving, or changing. For Parlá, this painting is an offering; a way of honoring the unseen forces that guide us through life’s transitions.

“Eleguá is my guardian angel,” Parlá shares. Born on Eleguá’s day, he feels closely connected to the messenger of the gods and guardian of crossroads. This bond reaches back to his Cuban roots. The rhythms of Cuban music, the blend of Yoruba, Spanish, and Lucumí languages shaping his sense of reverence. In Japan, he first encountered statues of Jizo, a gentle and childlike being that comforts lost souls and offers solace in pain. That respect for guardians threads through both cultures, joining his personal and artistic journeys.

By linking these two deities, Parlá opens doors and creates a bridge across cultures, making space for healing, reflection, and guidance. His layered, textured surfaces carry the spirit of both traditions, which is rooted in ancestry but always forward-focused. Like much of his work, Architect of Pathways (2025) becomes a map for those navigating their own journeys, a reminder that there is meaning in the spaces between and knowledge accumulated along the way to the destination. This sense of fluidity between cultures, mediums, modes of existence, is also showcased in the work, Tropical Calligraphies (2025), where Parlá compresses the energies of Japanese calligraphy, New York’s aerosol art, and familial script into a multigenerational conversation, collapsing time and space into one continuous flow that bridges past and present.

Music of Walls (2025) pulses with underground sound culture. It draws from 90s hip-hop, Miami Bass, Tokyo house, and Rumba. For Parlá, rhythm is not just heard, it is painted. “As a young child, I was surrounded by music and a festive energy,” Parlá says. He recalls Cuban records at home, salsa in the streets of Puerto Rico, and the bass-heavy anthems shaping his youth in Miami. This sonic background lives in his brushwork, where gestures loop and echo like a DJ’s mix. “Music of Walls is my translation of rhythm. If sound could be seen, it would look like the textures and flows in my paintings.” 

 Install shot, Pola Museum Annex, Home Away from Home, Courtesy of the Artist
 

In an era marked by division and dislocation, Home Away from Home reminds us that perhaps art’s best quality is its ability to be a connective tissue. Parla's paintings celebrate the power of community and gathering, as well as the joy of dancing through the night with those who see and understand us. It affirms that in order to navigate a fragmented world, we must turn toward one another and move in rhythm across our differences to rediscover what connects us.  As Parlá puts it, “When we recognize ourselves in others, we begin to heal.” WM