The Brooklyn Rail

It was fitting for Jorge Pardo’s latest show at Elba Benítez to have opened the same week as ARCOmadrid, the city’s banner international art fair. There’s nothing quite like an art fair to efficiently strip one of any straggling illusion of Kantian disinterestedness when it comes to art consumption—an apposite action for what is unambiguously turned by an art fair’s intrinsic structure into a usable, tradable, and shippable luxury commodity product. Before you know it, you find yourself evaluating every booth with a set of thoroughly practical considerations: “This one is really pretty, but at those prices ?”; “Would I want to look at this one every day in my bedroom?”; “How does that one even attach to the wall? Would you be safe putting a couch under it?”

The story is not all that new, exactly: where an earlier nineteenth-century paradigm drew a dividing line between decorative and fine arts at the spot where an object’s practical application and use-value either superseded or fell behind its aesthetic properties and conceptual expression, already by the time of Bauhaus’s peak influence, the market’s skillful reification of art’s revolutionary aesthetics toward trendy product design became both inevitable and definitively unsurprising—making the conceptually slippery divider between “art” and “design” all the more infinitely indeterminate. By 1966, Dan Flavin had little compunction about confidently averring, “I believe that art is shedding its vaunted mystery for a common sense of keenly realized decoration.”

At what point, exactly, does art begin to fit in with the interior just a little bit too seamlessly? When does useful become a little too useful? From the very beginning of his career, Jorge Pardo has been among the key artists whose explicit acknowledgement of, and reflection on, this condition constituted the focal element of the artwork itself. It was sufficient enough, in fact, to inspire in Joe Scanlan’s essay, circa 2001, “Please, Eat the Daisies,” the coinage of the clunky term “design art,” defined as one that, in its most successful and radical forms, “pits one human impulse (consumption) against another (preservation) by incorporating a utility in the art object that threatens its physical well being.” As good design art plays itself out over time, Scanlan adds, “Our desire for beauty and utility coalesce in such a way as to confuse our motivations, making the avoidance of use and the destruction of beauty seem at turns both sensible and perverse.”

Pardo’s most widely recognized piece to date remains 4166 Sea View Lane (1998), commissioned by Los Angeles’s MOCA, which took the shape of an actual, fully functional house where the artist also happened to, at one point, reside and work. The latter is exemplary of the kind of cancellation of the usability/reflexivity binary that all of Pardo’s output consistently engages. The difference between art and design (or its fellow traveler, architecture), he once said, is that “art is born as an object, whereas architecture becomes an object”—where the former is self-reflexive by definition, the latter aspires to reflexivity that it may acquire as it enters the world of life and circulation: just think of the way Philip Johnson was fond of insisting that the building is never finished until its photograph is taken.

A marker of a good, marketable design brand is, of course, an easily recognized motif. Among those for Pardo is the distinct motif of geometrically patterned and sequentially arranged ceramic floor tiles, which in this show were to be found in one of the gallery’s rooms where they transformatively covered the full surface of the floor. The resulting effect of substituting the standard gray floor stone with the riotous and attention-usurping explosion of color and pattern is conjuring an interior space whose most structural element, rather than passively subtending the objects contained within it, draws notice to its own presence and demands to be observed: “We’re not in the white cube anymore,” it whispers.

Hanging above the tiled floor at Elba Benítez, his acrylic marker-on-MDF-board paintings are perhaps as close as Pardo gets to unambiguously conventional art proper. The move is as canny as it is conceptually watertight in folding the exhibition’s complete scheme on itself in a neat, full circle of reflexivity. By using industrial construction materials for the creation of the most emblematically archetypal of “art” objects, Pardo collapses the design/art binary embedded in all of his oeuvre and does so especially craftily by employing the visual language of the kind of abstraction particularly given to accommodation of interior décor’s expectations. Pardo’s paintings, more than anything else, come across as a happily blasé marriage between a wallpaper and a generalized idea of “abstract painting”—knowingly so. The two largest of the eighteen MDF pieces in the show—squares of vibrantly variegated green and yellow—shared the room with a trio of luxury Alcântara armchairs from the modernist architect Siza Vieira, creating a domestic interior tableau worthy of an Architectural Digest spread with a wry wink. Completing the room’s décor schema were the brilliantly colored and vaguely jellyfish-shaped pendant lamps, another of Pardo’s design trademarks. The particular iteration of the Pardo Lamp at hand was constructed out of intricately laser-carved vertical strata of ornamentally curved acrylic panels that softly diffuse the glow of the cocooned inner lighting element that is hued by the interaction with semi-hidden brightly colored plastic insets. Lined up in a neat file running from the far end of one of the gallery’s rooms to the dividing corridor, the symphony of the lamps’ complementary shades—orange, blue, green, purple, and pink—along with the transparent acrylic’s cloud-like, quasi-vaporous hovering presence, here created an undeniably and distinctly visual experience of the sort firmly embedded in an art gallery or a museum setting and far removed from a furniture showroom.

One of Pardo’s most favored interview lines is one in which he continuously relishes the fact that “artists are the only people who get to just make you look at stuff.” And that’s precisely where one finds oneself with the best of his work—just looking, experiencing the objects and the created environment around you, foregoing and forgetting, if only for as long as you remain inside the show’s bubble, to pragmatically break down their useability with an end goal in mind. At that, Pardo’s main sleight of hand remains that of paradoxically transforming objects into experiences—an operation that turns on its head architecture’s own historical aspiration to “become an object.” That’s a feat impressive enough at any time. And with an art fair raging just outside? About as timely as you could hope to get these days.