Primarily a painter of murals, paintings, and works on paper, José Parlá also produces installations, video, sculpture, and photographic works that explore or respond to urban landscapes. Parlá’s large-scale compositions resemble city walls that, like palimpsests or psychogeographic maps, have accrued years of ephemera, posters, and fliers; he blends curvy gestures, calligraphy, and personal inscriptions with blurred color fields, using brushes, markers, spray paint, and sometimes fragments of fliers and posters. Parlá has produced several public commissions, including a giant mural at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn. “With making abstract painting,” he has said, “I felt that what I was doing and what I’m still doing is translating the many different cultures and many different languages that I’m confronting.”