The art world is going through a process of reconciliation with figurative art, by looking back in order to look forward. Beginning instruction as a youth in his father’s Guadalajara, Mexico studio devoted to Spanish decorative art and reproductions of the masters, Parra’s early works were immersed in the influence of the Baroque and Mannerist schools: the Baroque ideals of richly dramatic and theatrical were balanced by the Mannerist intellectual sophistication as well as artificial and idealistic qualities – highly emotional in content and execution. As his painting instruction an skills advanced Parra came under the influence of the work of the idealistic school of contemporary representational art as found in the work of Frederick Hart, particularly his Dantesque, famous The Creation of Mankind sculptural relief that to Parra revealed the ideas of philosopher Teilhard de Chardin’s sweeping account of the unfolding of the cosmos: energy into matter, matter into mind, mind into spirit. Parra’s art blends these influences in a unique manner – an ‘idealistic, contemporary Baroque’ that finds contemporary man reflecting his Baroque/Manneristic inspired fantastic characters in tableaus that offer a path to finding and honest yet ideal world of ideas and emotions.  His goal is to re-open a dialogue between subject matter and background, to tell a story in this new context, and to reach for idealism – that search for beauty and for magic in the ordinary, glamour in goodness, and hope in the apocalyptic. For José Parra a painting is a world translated into color and shapes, a ticket to travel within ourselves and beyond.