JORGE PARDO
28 July - 07 November 2004
CaixaForum
Av. Marques de Comillas, 6-8
08038-Barcelona
Tel.: 902 22 30 40
Jorge Pardo’s project for the Contemporary Art Collection is an invitation to reflect on traditional art exhibition practice. The artist has constructed a sumptuous environment- covering the walls with reliefs and lighting up the exhibition gallery with extraordinary coloured lamps – in order to exhibit a number of works from the collection. Art and decoration are juxtaposed in this installation by setting up an ambiguous interplay of hierarchies which calls into question the conventions related to the presentation, context and perception of art.
Jorge Pardo has set out to highlight the presence of the exhibition gallery by creating a scenario saturated with shapes and colours that challenges the neutral and timeless space in which modern art has always been shown, a space which has never admitted of any interference that might affect the viewing of the work but that has ended up conditioning the identity of art. Pardo, whose work as an artist arises out of a concern to restore the relationship between art and the daily world we live in, asks himself whether it makes any sense nowadays to isolate art and to continue interpreting it under the protection of the white walls of art institutions. In setting about this task he makes use of his experience as an artist and his extensive knowledge in the field of design and decoration.
With this work he creates a new aesthetic space to set against a number of works based on the ideology of minimalist art, an art that underlined the dialectic between the art object and the surrounding space. Pardo responds by speculating on the degree of autonomy these works possess when they are placed in a context different from that of their history as an art form. The aim of his contribution is not to negate the ideology behind these works, but rather to review them and reinterpret them according to new valuations.
The work of Jorge Pardo (born in Havana, Cuba, in 1963 and resident in the United States since 1969) lies in the boundaries between artistic disciplines such as sculpture and painting, and those functional disciplines such as architecture and design. With his work he has helped to expand the practice of art, developing a wide variety of activities including creation of art objects, exhibitions displays, architectural interventions, and various design and decoration projects. At no time, however, does this artist usurp the role of the architect or of the interior decorator. Jorge Pardo defines his work as sculpture, without heeding the possible traditional limits placed on that discipline, but attentive rather to what it means as a questioning of our situation and our relationship with all that surrounds us.