San Jose native, an award-winning Chilean-American Film Director based in New York, debuted his first solo art exhibition at @empire7studios.

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INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION:

My name is Danilo para. This is my first solo exhibition. It’s being held at Empire Seven galleries, and the show is called in limbo. I’m originally from San Jose. I went to Lincoln High School. I grew up here skateboarding with all the skateboard community, and eventually left to pursue a film career in New York, I dropped out of art school from San Francisco Academy of Art University, and then felt like, what am I going to do now?

So I had a friend that was already living in New York, and he had a job working at VICE doing documentaries. So I flew to New York and started working on documentaries, filming them, eventually executive producing some of them, and just traveled the world doing, you know, pursuing my career and pursuing filmmaking in New York.

New York is really a place where documentaries kind of like more of the film work. I guess I was looking for. I didn’t want to go to L.A.. L.A. felt like to, I don’t know if I was ready for Hollywood Life or reality TV life, because I feel like that’s what’s there. But New York offered kind of more of a run-and-gun style filmmaking that I liked, you know, because I grew up skateboarding, filming skate videos, and doing music videos for my brother and things like that. So it’s, I just liked being in charge of almost all the different aspects of it.

One of my earliest memories in childhood was a painting that my mom and my dad had on our wall in the living room. I always think about that painting because it showed kind of their love story, which obviously created me, created my brother. It’s beautiful to see your parents having creative outlets. And I guess the difference of a parent that’s just trying to raise a child stressfully and not pursuing their creative talents. I’m fortunate, I didn’t really have too much of that. Like, I feel like my mom was, she’s a Latin jazz singer, so she’s always pursuing her her career and what she really wanted to do.

I mean, my parents set me up on a, you know, performing arts schools. So in performing arts, you’re acting a little bit, you’re going, I’m in school plays, but there’s also art schools and art classes and painting, so I think I really just got in on and loving that. Because my mom would put my art on the fridge and put my art, you know, and then I started putting my art on the fridge, and then all over my room. And then I, when I finally had a car, I, you know, I stenciled my whole car. My whole car was graffitied and stenciled on like, I just couldn’t stop.

I don’t even think I knew anything. I just, I just, I had the passion to just constantly create, you know, I was addicted. At first, I thought I was addicted to the spray paint smell, but then I think I just liked making something and then making it for a friend and making my friend happy, you know, or making a skateboard for my friend, for my brother, for my brother’s CDs and my brother’s music.

So, yeah, I think I just it hit me hard. So I just wanted to keep pursuing visual arts, you know, and which kind of fell into visual storytelling, you know. And visual storytelling was more of what I wanted to do with my film career. And so when I finally kind of started taking paintings more seriously, I wanted to communicate visual stories like, what is the kind of world building, and what is the scene and the setting, and then what characters should be in that scene and setting, and what should they be doing, and create stories that kind of mean something deeper to me, which I feel like come from, you know, a filmmaking kind of storytelling brain, you know, because I do music videos, and sometimes you hear, you have a song come to you from an artist, and you have to think, what are the visuals and what’s the story, and how is, how you’re going to keep An audience to watch your whole music video, because some music videos are really boring. So I wanted, I want to tell a beginning, middle and end story that allows you to follow all the way to the end. I want people to make it to the end of the video. So I think I brought that into the paintings and kind of create a story that brings you in and keeps you there for a little bit, and makes you look around the painting and see like, you know what, what you might find, and you know you can have your own conclusions what the story will be, because it’s, it’s a painting. It’s not really there’s no audio. There’s no no one’s guiding you through it. You have to kind of guide yourself through the story.

Every painting is going to have a different contrast with colors. And I really, I’ve gravitated to vibrant colors. I used to film in the Museum of Modern Art, like profiles on some big artists like Joan Miró, and I remember going through one of the galleries, and he had one painting that was just so vibrant, and it stood out amongst all the other paintings, and it caught my attention. So I started to think. You know, sometimes you have to look around the world and the arts that you see and find what you like, you know, and that helps you understand what you want. So when I started taking painting more seriously, I kind of wanted to create these colors and this vibrancy that maybe would even relate to a film piece that I’m working on. What are the color schemes and and also finding ways to simplify the colors. Because I know when colors are everywhere and too much of them, it just starts to look like vomit. But when colors are simplified, they I think you’re able to be brought into the story easier. You know, you’re able to kind of latch on to what the story is about and yeah, simplify what people see.

Every painting is different. I don’t really have I don’t like painters that paint the same style of painting over and over again. I want every single painting to be something new that people would be excited and see the visual variety as something that they want to know what’s the next one going to be like, because that’s how I feel about it. I don’t know what the next one’s going to be like. And I want to be excited about every single one, and not treat these paintings like a factory that’s making what you want to see. I want to surprise you what you didn’t expect to see.

My first paintings were acrylic. They were also spray painting, spray painted, painting stencils. But I started to, well, my wife was somebody that said, “Why don’t you start oil painting?” And she got me a whole set of oil paints for Christmas, and it was one of the best gifts I’ve ever got. So I found really quickly that I love the way oils kind of create almost a simpler shading, you know, like that things smear together and become more smooth, and I feel like you could round out something that feels more three dimensional, with bringing the highlights to the shadows.

I just really liked how oils kind of felt like they came together better, you know. But I think I brought the acrylic kind of colors and vibrancy, because with oil, you have to layer and layer and layer to get that same vibrancy, because once you see the oils dry, it starts to desaturate a bit. So then I have to come back and how could I bring those colors back to maybe similar to what a acrylic, you know, paint would be.

I have a painting in this show. The show’s called “In Limbo,” and then my favorite painting in the show is called “A Limo in Limbo.” It’s a scene where a limo driver is driving all these businessmen in suits, and you could tell that something kind of shady is happening in the car, and you could see that there’s class differences between the people Inside the car and what’s happening outside the car. I painted that painting during the pandemic while living in New York, and a lot of the wealthy people left New York, and so what was left on the street were mostly homeless people looking for dollars in cash, and trashes were on fire. And all types of post-apocalyptic visuals are what I would see when I’d ride my bike around New York during that time because the city was empty. So I was trying to think, you know, what kind of class juxtaposition I could find in one painting and create a perspective where you could see everything happening all at the same time.

Danilo Parra’s first solo painting show, “In Limbo,” is on display from September 7, 2024, through October 5, 2024 at Empire Seven Studios. @danilorparra.
525 N7th St. Suite 10. San Jose, CA 95112