Jorge Pardo
Cuban, 1963- (active USA, Mexico)
Untitled (Sea Urchin), 2012
aluminum, molded Plexiglass, canvas, electrical chords, lightbulb
54 x 60 x 60 in.
SBMA, Museum Purchase with funds provided by The Museum Contemporaries and the 20th Century Art Quasi Endowment Fund
2014.59a,b
COMMENTS
Jorge Pardo has spent his career so restlessly straddling the borders of sculpture, design and furniture that he has drawn humorous comparisons to IKEA and Martha Stewart. If you can't afford his luminous, geometric outdoor installations in massive concrete, you can always hope for a lamp. His lush colors and dancing forms make their way into houses, interiors, chairs, even clocks. If you flip through the new Phaidon book "Jorge Pardo," his innumerable mutations feel like a Disney "Fantasia" in which lamps float away as glowing butterflies. Plant-like shapes loom somewhere between Fred Flintstone and the Jetsons, with sprightly touches reminiscent of Picasso cohort Wilfredo Lam. Massive concrete geometric forms are illuminated with warm colors.
A Pardo one-man show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami earlier this year commingled his lamps, chairs and traditional sculpture. "Jorge adopts the idea of taking the artwork off the pedestal and putting it in everyday space," said Bonnie Clearwater, the museum director. "What happens when that sculpture looks like a table or a chair? How do you know it's artwork?" she said. "It's that philosophical questioning that has propelled him from the beginning of his career to the present. I love the fact that he gets under my skin with these questions, and I think that it's brilliant that he's doing this at L.A. County Museum of Art."
If Pardo has become known for resisting easy characterization, that tendency extends to his most basic self-definition as an artist. Though he is Cuban-born and grew up in a Spanish-speaking household, "I wouldn't define myself as a Hispanic or Latino artist," he said. "I'm an American artist." As an artist, his ethnicity is "kind of second- or third-tier information; I've never wanted to be associated with this kind of typecasting. It closes you down in a lot of important ways, to be cast in an ethnic type. If you don't want to be in it, you fall into it by default, and that's kind of disturbing." "The funny thing is, culturally I'm incredibly Latin," he added. "I'm totally fluent in Spanish. But I think that's American. That's the thing about this country -- that you get people like me over and over again."
Pardo doesn't deny the echoes of the pre-fab modernism some see in his work, but he finds the "celebratory nature of modern retro movement a little strange," especially the current love affair with what is currently termed "midcentury modern." "The more-dirty parts of these objects are kind of cleaned up by fetishizing them," he said. "They're not looking at the history these objects represent. It was horrible to be black or to be a woman in the '50s, or Latino," he said. "All these conservatives were thriving in the '50s. Nostalgia trivializes these aspects."
Yet he clearly loves some of the modernist lines and shapes popularized in the 1950s. His luminous, large outdoor sculptures -- such as the massive, warmly lit concrete geometric "Guadalajara Light Piece" for the Solares Foundation in Guadalajara -- have a direct relationship with smaller pieces, like lamps. The smaller pieces allow him to quickly explore ideas that may eventually become large sculptures -- or may simply remain lamps.
"Artists traditionally make drawings to sharpen use of form or color. The lamps are like drawings," he explained. "The smaller things inform the larger ones. They're small trials. When it works well, everything kind of communicates with one another."
His use of color is more than just a language; it's a way of seducing the eye, including his own. "Color is something that I use as a lure," he said. "You kind of need this artifice to attract and engage the work. It kind of keeps people there, and you start to unfold the other elements of the pieces." His bright colors, he said, are "not used as a litmus test for seriousness. I happen to like these colors, and I use them because there is a certain amount of pleasure to using them."
- Excerpted from Anne-Marie O'connor, "Sculptor Jorge Pardo: Is it art or furniture?", Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2008
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-pardo8-2008jun08-story.html#page=1
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Jorge Pardo has become known for his sculpture and large-scale installations that ignore the established protocols of the museum exhibition, merging life with art. His work often conflates art with function, and philosophically overlaps with the experimental architecture of Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, and the Case Study Houses, which Pardo cites as influential to his work.
Part of the artist’s lamp series, Untitled (Sea Urchin) is inspired in part by classic, mid-century design, particularly Scandinavian lamps. Through the appropriation of domestic architecture and design, the artist effectively dissolves the boundaries between such disciplines and fine art.
- Contemporary to Modern, 2014