Artist: Jorge Pardo

Petzel presents a short-term exhibition from Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo. Comprised of four thirteen-foot by thirteen-foot abstract paintings, the exhibition takes place in the gallery’s private viewing room, open to the public. Each painting is deeply layered with images that are both art historical and personal, designed with software, etched with a laser, and painted by hand.

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.”

About Jorge Pardo

Born in Havana, Cuba in 1963, Jorge Pardo studied at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In 2024, he was named the Landcraft Garden Foundation’s Sculpture in the Garden artist. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions including SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, (2023); Museum of Art & Design, Miami (2021); Petzel Gallery, New York (2021); Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne (2020); Pinacoteca de Estado São Paulo, São Paulo (2019); Hacienda la Rojeña, Tequila, MX (2019); Victoria Miro, London (2018); José García, Mérida, MX (2016); David Gill Gallery, London (2015); Musée des Augustins, Toulouse (2014); neugerriemschneider, Berlin (2014); Gagosian Gallery, New York (2010); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2010); K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2009); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2008); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2007). Paintings by the artist were included in the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). Jorge Pardo currently lives and works in Mérida, Mexico.

His work is part of numerous public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Jorge Pardo has been the recipient of many awards including the MacArthur Fellowship Award (2010); the Smithsonian American Art Museum Lucelia Artist Award (2001); and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1995).