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Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Jorge Pardo

by John McGee

Installation of paintings and sculpture by Jorge Pardo at Taka Ishii Gallery
(Image courtesy the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery)

Painters like to complain about insensitive collectors looking for art to go with their sofas. Los Angeles-based artist Jorge Pardo preempts such conflicts—he makes matching paintings and sofas. And chairs, lamps and beds. He's even designed and built his own house. 

Pardo, born in Havana, Cuba, in 1963, studied fine art—not architecture—at Art Center College of Design in Southern California, a school famous for its modernist glass-and-steel Craig Ellwood building and Bauhaus-inspired curriculum (and where, incidentally, Pardo was a librarian for some time). His home, finished in 1998, is not a house but a sculpture entitled 4166 Sea View Lane, which the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) helped bankroll. From lounges to lamps, Pardo's work, inspired by 1950s and '60s modernism, explores how perception and use-value forge distinctions between art and design. 

This show—Pardo's first in Tokyo—looks like a catalog spread on bachelor-pad style, with two paintings, each made of 10 panels, and a set of five wooden floor lamps. If Charles Eames had had a Noguchi-Mongolian period, he might have conceived these sculptural electrical fixtures. The squatting, articulated bell forms are made of overlapping slats of steam-bent plywood (like Eames' famous plywood leg splints), unfinished on the outside and red on the inside. Light from a thin vertical bulb flickers out through simple geometric patterns cut into the wooden planes, sending radiating slivers of light slicing across the floor. 

The paintings are composed of 10 separate panels placed side by side. Twisted ellipses that look like koi swim in red, green, yellow and orange striations with overlapping checks woven across the surface. But are these really paintings? In technique, size and application, they are closer to wallpaper: An inkjet printer sprays the computer designs on the tall, skinny canvas. And the panels, each slightly narrower than a standard wallpaper roll, can be rearranged as the owner wishes. 

Interaction plays into many of Pardo's installations and pseudo-industrial objects-cum-sculptures. Over the last several years, he has raised interest and hackles across Europe and the US by adding a redwood pier to a lake for the 1997 "Skulptur. Projekte" in Muenster, Germany; building a sailboat for his show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and adding colorful tile and a life-size clay model of the new VW Beetle to the first floor of New York's Dia Center for the Arts. And he's just finishing a bar in LA's new hip art zone, Chinatown. 

Pardo employs surfaces of modernism that elsewhere in contemporary culture are sentimentalized into retro trends or used as marketing gimmicks. One current fashion is outfitting Tokyo in white shag and red fiberglass. Another uses modernism's sheen to sell simple, low-quality furniture to indifferent consumers. Ikea is a furniture store, not a museum. Right? 

According to Oscar Wilde, "all art is quite useless." Pardo's DIY projects portray Wilde's high ideal reclining uncomfortably, but seductively, atop an ill-formed pile of consumer desire.

This exhibition was held Mar-Apr 2002 at Taka Ishii Gallery in Kita-Otsuka, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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