Mother Dearest Detour Magazine
September 1996 By Brant Tume
MANUEL PARDO IS GAY, CUBAN, AND A PAINTER. He loves his mother, knows it’s a queer cliché, and offers no apologies. Rather, Pardo celebrates both his mother and his queerness, reveling in the cliches and transforming them into the vocabulary of his art. Emigrating from Cuba in 1962 at the age of ten, Pardo left behind both his father and Fidel’s Castro’s Communist regime to start a new life abroad in New York City. He narrates a classic tale of motherly self-sacrifice with passion, a personal saga to rival Stella Dallas, and has commemorated his filial devotion in a series of paintings entitled My Mother and I in Technicolor. “These paintings are about my mother’s life in America,” Pardo says with emotion. “When we got here she spoke no English; she was a medical professional and a professional midwife, but was forced to take work as a factory laborer. My father stayed behind in Cuba- he was a Communist, that was his right; but my mother sent my sister and I on ahead and followed later, and when she got here her only priority was to see that we got educated.
Toward that end, she worked 16 hours a day for more than 20 years so that we would have the advantages to succeed in this new society. “It sounds like a joke,” Pardo laughs, “but I always say that she raised us by telephone. Every time my mother got a break at work, she’d call to make sure we were OK. It was her incredible dedication that gave me the will to succeed. Some people might say that it’s a parent’s duty to make sacrifices, but my mother went way beyond the call of duty as far as I’m concerned. To me she is nothing less than a hero. “What can I do to give back to her portion of what she has given to me?” Pardo asks rhetorically.
“That’s why I’ve invented this device, these paintings- Mother and I- to be not just about my ego, but about her, to try to make history understand what a woman can do, and will do, for her family.” Pardo’s paintings idealize their subject with elaborate hairdos and wardrobe, posing her as carefully as Ingres posed his duchesses, and are executed in folk-art style that references Frida Kahlo, I Love Lucy, and Carmen Miranda, in a color palette straight out of a 1950s melodrama with color by Deluxe. “Technicolor- that’s the tint of the times I grew up in,” Pardo laughs, “the late 50s, Hollywood, Lana Turner… Even though I wasn’t living in the middle of that movie culture, it’s the one I raised with. Good old American Technicolor is the same whether you’re in New York, Miami or Havana- it’s bigger than life.
And again, I like to return to the cliches for inspiration- gay men have historically been in the service of women as hairdressers, fashion designers, make up men, and such, so I’ve taken it one step further by merging my personality with the portraits of my mother. I like to take the old cliches and wave them like banners- it is about a queer and his mother. “There is a gay sensibility that’s not just about penises and handcuffs, and I’ve made it my job to see that there will continue to be.
That’s why my new series of paintings is called the ‘Mary’ series, as in ‘Oh, Mary, don’t ask.’” Movie queens of the world may rest easy knowing that old-school queer aesthetics are secure for another generation, and the mothers of America should build a shrine to Manuel Pardo, a mama’s boy who’s loud and proud. Mother, now 70, lives in Westchester with her daughter, and she couldn’t be prouder. My Mother and I in Technicolor: Paintings by Manuel Pardo runs September 19- October 19, 1996 at Griffin Linton Contemporary Exhibitions in Venice, California.
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