Jorge Pardo Exhibition - Victoria Miro
2nd February - 24th March 2018
Adult Price: FREE
Highly acclaimed for his use of vibrant colours, eclectic patterns, natural and industrial materials, Jorge Pardo, a MacArthur Fellow, has been drawing upon the historical intersections of fine art, architecture, and design since the 1990s to create a large and highly unique body of work. It is characterised most notably by its genre fluidity; his work includes paintings, murals, sculptures, furniture, and even entire buildings. His pieces are multifaceted, with multiple meanings, purposes, and contexts. He effectively blurs the line between the ‘art world’ and the ‘real’ one, inviting the re-evaluation of images, objects, and architectural spaces.
Pardo’s exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery features various lamps— some free standing, others suspended—which range in scale from one to 1.7 metres tall. They are distributed throughout the first floor gallery, starkly contrasting the exposed beams and brick of the building. The lamps are made from sinuous lines of laser cut PETG plastic resin that surround a central fitting. Lengths of the same material, perforated with geometric motifs, are hung in fringed formations to create elegant chandelier-like fixtures. They prompt the consideration of physicality and immateriality, filling space with both physical form and light. Their sculptural form recalls natural phenomena, such as animal or plant life, whilst the light they emit is more variously controlled and less tangible. The spaces between the works are the site of remarkable interplay between light and shadow— this is itself altered by the viewers’ shadows and movements within the space.
On the ground floor of the gallery, and in the atrium space that connects the gallery floors, paintings have been installed which range from two to nearly five metres in height. Though they are called ‘paintings’, they are in fact composed of layers of laser-cut birch wood ply and MDF, milled, perforated, and painted so that evocations— of image, colour, and form— appear to shift as the viewer changes the angle at which they view the work. Ostensibly completed only in red, orange, yellow, and blue, the works reveal, upon closer observation, tesserae-like surfaces of tertiary and complementary hues. The surface is cut with circular and linear motifs, giving it a topographical appearance. The layers underneath, glimpsed from different angles, create moiré-like patterns which greatly entertain the eye, and subtly evoke the images of landscape and weather.
Walking the line between the practical and poetic, and oscillating between organic and manmade, Pardo’s art achieves a playful multiplicity, insisting on a more fluid relationship between form and function. The works in this exhibition expand upon the artist’s exploration of composition and the classification of genres, and his experimentation with manners of display and production.
