Aaron Parazette in New York

NEW YORK—The starting points for Aaron Parazette’s latest paintings are drawn from surfers’ slang. In works like Bitchin', Bomb, and Kook, he takes those words, treats them to all sorts of digital manipulation—stretching, scrambling, and flipping until they are rendered almost illegible—and transfers them by hand from computer to large-scale canvases, where he adds a high-keyed palette and near-flawless finish. There’s amusement to be had in trying to decipher the source words, but the real satisfaction delivered by these pictures is in their vibrant colors, their shimmering, vibrating surfaces, and the abstract energy and balance of their compositions.

Parazette is a native of Southern California, where he discovered his passion for surfing, and now lives in Houston, where he is an associate professor of painting at the University of Houston. His latest New York show is at Marlborough Chelsea until December 8.

Here are his out-of-towner’s selections of New York exhibition highlights for this weekend, starting with a two-for-one bonus at the Museum of Modern Art:

1. 50 Years of Helvetica at MoMA, through March 31, and Martin Puryear at MoMA, through January 14

“Visit MOMA to see two shows that present equally monumental forces in western culture—albeit of very different sorts. The Helvetica show on the third floor pays a 50th-anniversary tribute to the Western world’s most ubiquitous typeface. The fact that MOMA has devoted an entire exhibition to a single font speaks for itself. The show has special significance for me: Helvetica proved very useful in my early word paintings as I engaged in the design blasphemy of stretching and bending its letters in my search for a place between word and image. Thank you, Helvetica, and please forgive my transgression.

“On the sixth floor, and in the main atrium, there is a Martin Puryear retrospective featuring 45 sculptures from the last 30 years. Puryear is without question the unrivaled grand master of reductive hand-wrought sculpture. Both architecture and animal, frightening and inviting, each and every piece effortlessly holds and projects presence—that quality once so highly sought after, and now so rare to find. The exhibition is a must see, if only to be in company of such thoughts and things.” 

2. Pricked: Extreme Embroidery at the Museum of Arts & Design, through March 9

“With the line between art and craft forever erased, it's good to see shows that, even if organized around a particular ‘craft,’ feature artists that could blow your mind with any material. 'Pricked' is one of those shows. The method is embroidery, the art is extreme. This show at once makes no sense and perfect sense—like every good group show. An excellent counterpoint before or after MoMA.”

3. Carl Ostendarp at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, December 1 through January 12

“Always a provocative favorite of mine, Ostendarp is audacious in his reduction of comic moments, and a master of strange colors that seem keyed to repel but never fail to seduce. A must-see for anyone with deep faith in either pure or ironic abstraction. Remarkably, Ostendarp's work is always both.” 

4. Charles Ray at Matthew Marks Gallery, through January 19

“The new dean of L.A.’s cool school, Charles Ray is always about cunning surface fetish, while still offering plenty of ethos and pathos. This show presents an odd trinity—The New Beetle, Father Figure, and Chicken. With the industrial perfection commanding absolute attention (devotion?) and the players themselves inviting dissension, the results are serene.”

5. Alan Saret: Gang Drawings at the Drawing Center, through February 7

“Alan Saret's drawings are precise records of a desperate and euphoric search. At once violent and loving, clawing and petting, they record the interaction of the self and other (tools). Made with handfuls—‘gangs’—of colored pencils, the drawings contain the process of their making. They take and hold as their subject Saret's hand and mind at work. In our image-saturated world, this show is a beautiful reminder that such modest intentions can be enough.”