| Manuel
Pardo’s nine generic, nearly identical still-life paintings each consist
of a schematized pink and green vase containing three roses with menacing
thorns. Each painting has a different background color – acid yellow,
lime green, hot pink, neon orange, electric blue as well as indescribable
shades of lavender, turquoise, purple, and red. The nine images, identically
hand-painted, are heavily outlined in black, and a simple black line
is used to differentiate foreground from background. Each is enclosed
in a very heavy, angled black frame. |
| These
paintings, alone or in a group, provoke odd responses, from an experienced
critic’s puzzled, “What in the world is this supposed to be” to a
decorator’s observation that he couldn’t hang a painting like that
in anyone’s living room because nothing else could possibly share
the same space with it. Certainly, they are unconventional on any
number of levels. They don’t look quite like anything seen within
familiar gallery/ museum/ art school/ studio contexts. They are in
part reminiscent of commercial greeting cards, cartoons, kids’ advertising,
and late sixties (Pucci-type) fabric design, but this pop sensibility
is improbably combined wit stylistic hints of such early modernist
giants as Picasso and Matisse. Lurking uncomfortably on the periphery
are also shades of Leonid Carzou and Bernard Buffet, but the result
doesn’t have the self-conscious campiness that usually comes when
“high” art is turned into kitshe. I suppose what’s so shocking about
these paintings, both initially and even over time, is that they’re
unequivocally synthetic. There’s no illusion in them at all. |
| They
simply don’t refer to visual experiences outside the act and process
of making art, even if the “art” in question is the kind we see everyday-
advertising, calendars, posters, greeting cards, toys, paint-by-number
sets- that isn’t necessarily called by that name. The enormous, thick
handcrafted frames which seem as important, if not more so, than the
images themselves, are not confrontational, they are visual barriers
that force you to focus on the painting as a painting. Like religious
icons, their visual strength and singularity creates a direct, one-to-one
relationship between the viewer and the work, a relationship in which
the painting takes over and subsumes the viewer. These pieces are
literal objects that could almost be described as sculptures. They
are, says Pardo, oversized in the way that everything in the contemporary
life in America is oversized, so as to bring the work into a close
relationship with society. |
| Emigrating
from Cuba at the age of 10, Pardo eventually graduated from The School
of Visual Arts in Manhattan. On the one hand, he benefited enormously
from contact with such experienced older artists as Jennifer Bartlett
and Richard Artschwager; on the other; as a young artist exploring
issues of “appropriation” in unconventional ways,1 he met enormous
resistance from many sources. This resistance ultimately reinforced
his sense of distance from the mainstream art community, but also
confirmed his commitment to particular issues and stylistic anomalies
with which he was already deeply engaged. Paramount for him, even
at this time, was an obsession with early modernism’s belief in itself
and in the fundamental value of painting; however, Pardo has consciously
avoided the consistent stylistic evolution which is characteristic
of modernism. |
| The
range of work in his studio indicates his phenomenal ability to paint
just about anything, in a way. (For instance, a series of portraits
of transvestites from the mid-1980s is executed in an eloquent, fluid
19th-century realistic mode. A subsequent series, based on Goya’s
Majas employs a more “modern” or abstract style.) Despite Pardo’s
outsider status- Cuban, gay and outspokenly antiauthoritarian- his
work is nonetheless engaged with certain very central and current
issues in art criticism today. These revolve around “the death of
paintings,” the contested premise that painting is no longer a valid
form of artmaking in today’s society. Once painting lost its authority
as a means of representing “reality”(the camera having replaced in
this dubious role) , its validity came to be questioned, despite the
fact that in the Western world its practitioners still for the most
part adhere to this 19th-century realist narrative model. |
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