Camilo Parra: Falling Skins Falling Skies

29/06/24 – 28/07/24

Fleshy entities sit uneasily alongside a series of endlessly subdivided spaces in the works of Camilo Parra. Things and environments so natural and yet so artificial could never have come into being without humanity’s intervention and must instead be surgically engineered. The nature of their perversion is inevitable: living tissue, excised from its native organ, is reinserted into the wrong places, binding together to form an impenetrable tapestry of flesh that lives, and yet has no function. Images resembling celestial charts, which at first appear to hold an element of truth about them, quickly reveal themselves as impossible reorganisations of space. Their structure is forced, a random division and categorisation of smaller spaces into a system without order. Or, rather, it is simply that there is a generic order apparent, and the order exists visible only to its architect.

There is a fundamental desire, a longing and a compulsion amongst Parra’s images; A need to defy the natural order, erase the boundaries of creation and re-impose them according to personal vision. Parra’s works are possessed by the human desire to remake one’s environment in one self’s image and imbued with ‘God-like’ power to make it happen. In this way, the roles of the artist and the surgeon are much alike. Both pursue an opportunity to understand their circumstance by dissecting what makes us human, creating and destroying often simultaneously.

At the most basic level, Parra as an artist, works with only two materials: space and matter. Unlike a scientist who observes and reports their reality, or a religious individual who believes a proposed reality without experiencing it, Parra investigates reality by replicating and manipulating it. The notion of control and the ability to operate ourselves and our surroundings is a fundamental human desire manifesting in Parra’s work.

In recent years, Parra has experienced not only this urge to have control but also the upset caused by a lack of it, both over himself and his environment. This took the form of a moral dilemma, in which he was, and still is, forced to compromise on his ethical principles to better his circumstances. Alongside this, he has also suffered from inexplicable health issues that have become a sub-current beneath his daily life. Rather than shying away from these conflicts, he chooses to run towards them, externalising his struggle forcing it out of himself and marking it onto the surfaces with which he presents us.

Our bodies and the spaces in which we live exist in a co-dependent relationship. Humans influence the spaces they inhabit; reproducing, building and defiling their world. Simultaneously, a person’s world destroys, inspires, and often kills them. It is likely this co-dependency, this symbiosis of being and context which has driven and continues to drive Parra to explore the microscopic and the macroscopic scale of his life. To examine one without consideration of the other would be tantamount to building a puzzle with only half the pieces.

- Joseph Oudkerk