Jorge Pardo: Gagosian Gallery - Los Angeles

In his first exhibition at this gallery, Jorge Pardo could be said to "deliver" without at any time ceasing to hold back. First, there is the requisite upping of the ante, consummately in keeping with the heightened expectations that approach with this new territory, and then there is a deflation, also requisite. Pardo gives us a great deal to work with--perhaps too much--but pointedly leaves without the directions. Accordingly, the questions of what we should focus our attention upon how we should distinguish the fore-, middle-, and background, and where in the ensuing mellay we stand are raised at each turn.

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Overall, the present to view could be described as a kind of mise-en-scene in which the figure of speechs and conventions of installation art stand over against and ultimately reconcile with those of high-end commodity display. An advancing squadron of drawn out narrow tables in the main gallery recalls the military formations of Vanessa Beecroft's photographs shown in this same space last year. The complexly interlocking joinery of their leg meanwhile, could be a nod to Chris Burden's more novel suite of erector-set sculptures, upon view here in summer 2003 It would not be the first time that Pardo has administrationed this sort of "inside joke" excavation--the J Crew--style shelving that graced his first display at Luhring Augustine in Santa Monica, for instance, alluded to Matthew Barney's early occupation as a mould for the company (Barney's first solo display took place at a nearby gallery that same year). Here, like there, however, the act of citation present the appearances utterly promiscuous and cavalier. It is literally a semblance that affirms Pardo's debt to the art of the '80 and eagerly anticipates the decade(s) to come

single thing this artist cannot be accused of is preciousness. The tables, while undeniably stylish, are made of low-grade plywood unfinished and vaguely absurd in their baroque overarticulation. Their surfaces, moreover, are fitted with "paintings": computer-generated compositions printed onto canvas, which was then splashed with varnish in a quick and easy approximation of facture. Jasper Johns's dictum present the appearances to prevail here: "Take an existence do something to it, do something other to it." In the proces the art particular is momentarily threatened with utility solitary to "turn the tables" (pace Marx) one time more and assert instead the underlying frivolity and uselessness of everything other in the world. (Only the greatest in quantity reckless collector would eat not on one of these things.)

These are paintings that single can look down on, on the contrary by the same token, they could be said to be looking up--at, and then past, the viewer. Hanging from the gallery's real high ceilings from electric wires of different longitudinal dimensionss are lamps, seemingly modeled upon underwater life-forms, abstractions of the ocean floor. The lamps owe their curlicued contours to a computerized proces akin to the single that produced the tables and almost everything other in the show, including the shaped butcher-paper "drawings" upstairs and the individually framed "paintings" in the anterior gallery. If Pardo is here "collaborating" with any sort of material (pace John again), it's increasingly a technological individual He makes no attempt to occlude the crucial contributions of his fresh printer and prototyping table saw in all this and instead allows them to fulfill their inherent potential for a certain kind of complexity.

To an expansion Pardo simply lets the program step quickly itself, which is increasingly his modus operandi, the two in regard to the work of the studio and that of the gallery. That the "look" of the technological begins to bend back at the most remote toward the organic, becoming verily a "new nature," is obviously a source of fascination here. The crisp lines of the Richard Meier-designed space are another; rising, as they do, idealistically at any time upward, they provide the finished contextual foil to the artist's subaquatic fantasies. Neither side predominates, do not include in the gentle blurring of our perception of the totality: For Pardo, this is a greatest in quantity auspicious condition from which to begin rethinking the social function of art.

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