MERCEDES PARDO IS HONORED ON THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF HER BIRTH AT THE ASCASO ART GALLERY
On the artist's centenary, the Ascaso Art Gallery of Caracas will present, together with the Otero-Pardo Foundation, an exhibition entitled “Contemplaciones y Memorias” (Contemplations and Memories), which under the curatorship of Bélgica Rodríguez and the museography of Rafael Santana, brings together a selection of paintings and serigraphs made by the outstanding creator.
Considered one of the most representative exponents of abstract art in Venezuela, Mercedes Pardo (Caracas, 1921-2005) studied at the School of Plastic and Applied Arts in Caracas, and in 1949 traveled to Paris where she received painting classes with André Lhote and studied art history at the Louvre Museum. Mercedes Pardo had an intense life in many fields of creation, not only because of her interest in the practice of various areas of the visual arts, painting, collage, engraving, drawing, serigraphs, applied arts, but also because of her dedication to artistic teaching, guided by the need to develop in children the sensitive ability to appreciate beauty through art.
From the beginning, two aspects complement each other in her work, according to the curator and art researcher Bélgica Rodríguez in one of her writings, “One is the rational care with which she builds the spatial compositional scaffolding by organizing geometric shapes without altering the main plane, forms that, apparently, start from the fragmentation of the central square that is the work itself; another corresponds to an emotional sensation that radiates a certain luminosity from its interior, it is the chromatic exultation that, paradoxically, even in its apparent overflow, is contained by and within the limits of the support”.
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Cortesía de Galería de Arte Ascaso
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Dunas, 2004 Acrílico sobre tela 85 x 120 cm. Cortesía de Galería de Arte Ascaso
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Rendijas, 1978 Acrílico sobre tela 126,9 x 111,8 cm. Cortesía de Galería de Arte Ascaso
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Sin título, 1989 Acrílico sobre tela 80 x 80 cm. Cortesía de Galería de Arte Ascaso
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Mercedes Pardo. Cortesía de Galería de Arte Ascaso
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"Sin título" Acrílico sobre tela, 56 x 156 cm. Cortesía de Galería de Arte Ascaso
According to the curator, “For Mercedes Pardo, ‘art’ was more than a definite or definitive trend. The defense of her creative freedom, a kind of plural mandala to be summed up in a deep interest in research on the behavior of color and geometric form, informalist or abstract, in the investigation of materials, in the exploration of other ways of structuring a geometric visual architecture closely linked to a passion in the quite personal treatment of the aesthetic value of color by the color located in space (...) To propose a sensitive geometry on the hardness of the square, the artist's preferred form, and of the straight line, especially in the last development stages of her painting, was a coherent act of plastic, formal and aesthetic force. Making this abstract-chromatic geometry vibrate is an unprecedented spatial proposal. In Mercedes' painting, geometry and space as sensitive perceptions correspond to a multiple aesthetic discourse”.
Mercedes Pardo developed an outstanding artistic career of more than five decades, during which she participated in group and solo exhibitions in Venezuela, Chile, France, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, Puerto Rico and Cuba, among other countries. She received important recognitions, such as the National Prize for Plastic Arts; Enamel Prize, International Exhibition of Artistic Crafts, Stuttgart, Germany; Special Edition Purchase Award, World Print III, San Francisco, California, USA; and Armando Reverón Award, AVAP; among others.
“Contemplaciones y Memorias”
Until mid-October, 2021
Galería de Arte Ascaso
Avenida Orinoco, Las Mercedes, Caracas
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