One could imagine Santiago Parra as a maestro swinging his baton, moving to the rhythm of his own music of his own beat, as he holds and swings his long-handled brush. 
His music is silent but his body reverberates in abandonment in the face of the raw canvas. It is a moment of honesty, but also of confrontation and dialog.
It is music, it is dance. The movement of the artist's body, hovering over the canvas, is transcribed into the arabesques and signs drawn on it. It is the expression of a movement, the recording of a performative act.
This physical engagement with his work begins with the making of his brushes, a wisp of horse's hair entangled and tamed by himself. Then, no tubes, no pots, but a heavy mass of paint poured into the empty canvas. The dance begins
Pure expression. 
The artist speaks a silent indiscernible language, telling himself in each gesture. It is him captured in a single moment. Fluid and intense, the gesture speaks and unfolds, almost instinctively almost unconsciously, letting the body manifest its own knowledge.
Each work thus becomes a singularity. A singular individual. A singular moment inscribed in its title. Which, by its a-categorical nature, grants them no hierarchy.
The canvas has to sustain the tension between its light, raw, empty areas and its thick areas of color. The suspended flatness of the canvas is superimposed by calligraphic-like imagery, displaying visible traces of its making process, shaped by movement, strength, gravity and skill.
Santiago Parra's greatest challenge will be to synthesize together two seemingly incompatible aesthetic moments, the spontaneous and the pondered, the gesture and its result on the canvas, in ways that will always still seem fresh and invigorating.   

Andreia Pocas, Lisboa, May, 2014

Santiago Parra: November, 2017
@ Rosenthal Fine Art.