JORGE PARDO

In creating his paintings, Pardo has pulled from a variety of source images, layering them beyond recognition to generate what looks like pure abstraction. Using a process he has developed over five years, Pardo overlays various source images, citing Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Édouard Manet, Dan Graham, and his own works in progress, among many others. They are digitally layered until visually estranged from their original compositions. Pardo’s renderings are then laser-engraved in outline on medium-density fiberboard (MDF), before being hand-finished, each painting in a distinct medium: oil paint, watercolor, acrylic marker, and colored pencil.

Pardo is interested in the “absurd problem of translation.” His paintings resist static representation and appropriation of references, instead introducing the viewer to a series of “contingencies,” as Pardo states in a 2019 conversation with Veronica Simpson: “I like the idea that artworks are like these contingency machines: the more you make, the longer they stay alive. They are not referential machines ... A reference is about stabilizing the meaning of something over and over again.”

Pardo adds an additional “contingency” through the titling of the paintings: as opposed to written captions, the artist has employed video documentation from the perspective of the laser cutter burning a drawing onto the surface of the panel. The moving image stands in for a written didactic, the artwork title, a view of process. The painting is made reflexive, making us aware of its making. As Pardo notes, “the laser becomes a mechanical audience member.” In observing his works mid-process from the vantage point of the laser-viewer, video-titles tease the boundary between the artist’s hand and the viewer’s gaze.

Further, Pardo’s use of the gallery back rooms represents an instinct to destabilize delineations between private and public space; an attempt to reverse and confuse the space of exhibition and the space for transaction. These concerns have been at the core of Pardo’s practice since his landmark 1993 MOCA exhibition-residence on Sea View Lane, in which the artist opened his home to visitors as a museum exhibition. This tenet persists at the core of Pardo’s approach, as his oeuvre dissolves categories of painting, sculpture, architecture, and design to challenge ways of seeing and “living with the work.”