Parladé, the disdain of a Dandy
For Titian, sunset is the hour for painting and sunset is the time to look at the houses of Jaime Parladé, in between august jasmines and snakes embraces.
This southern gentleman, with the disdain of a Dandy, enslaves his clients like a gigolo. He is the person that gives splendour to the houses of the powerful.
But not everybody can call upon Parladé to furnish their villas, because if he does not like the client, he says he is off to Mesopotamia in search of the lamps of the Canaanites or the lamps of the virgins. He searches to the ends of the earth for special pieces of furniture without stiffness; he has a narcissistic passion for mirrors. He lives on the road to Ronda married to an English Lady, painter of watercolours. She searches with a basket all day long for wild flowers. His home is Andalusian, aristocratic, baroque, but his art is eclectic, a synthesis of French refinement and English comfort and the grace and delicacy of Andalusia. There is not a corner of the world he does not know; he knows that marble is like the counterpoint in music and that beauty is part of theology.
“It is not the same to eat Stroganoff a la moutarde in Horcher’s or in a chiringuito”, says one of his client friends. He places furniture like an Haute Couture designer.
Parladé lives apart from the riffraff and the sequins of the world in a dolls house, protected by hornets and cicadas.
Raul del Pozo
El Mundo
Agosto 2007
