| When
I see roses I often find myself remembering lines of poetry, and a
vine of words winding through the undergrowth of the language to rise
into view in, say, William Blake, or Robert Herrik, or the garden
poems Andrew Marvell, or in Chaucer before them, or in the Scotsman
Robert Burns: O my Love’s like a red, red rose, / That’s newly sprung
in June. And then there are all those phrases their associations pulling
in such various, contrary directions: from Mighty like a rose to Everything’s
coming up roses to No bed of roses to The last rose of summer. These
are what come to me first, before any image in art-although countless
roses strew the still life tradition, and, just as richly, the traditions
of decoration and pattern. |
| Or
else I think not of the garden of English verses but of the English
garden itself, a place of blurred geometries and gentle crowdedness,
where the soft round shapes of roses may stand against slender spires
of lupin and foxglove or against cloud of flowering lavender, so that
colors, contours, textures, and perfumes all mingle and confuse. Manuel
Pardo’s painted roses aren’t like this at all. Clear, distinct and
allen, these declarative forms simplify the rococo subtlety of the
rose (and once again I’m thinking of the English rose, with it’s dense-packed
filigree blossom) into a single spiral, the flower a continuous band
that curls around itself once or twice in rising to a summit, then
slides back into its own heart. Sometimes a second band complements
this one, becoming a kind of basin around its foot. All of these roses
are red. Most of them get a painting themselves (a couple come in
pairs), standing alone against the flat color of a monochrome ground.
|
| A
duo or a trio of leaves intersect at the flower’s base, and each rose
sits on a thorny stem, short and upright, that disappears at the bottom
of the picture- the only place the figure touches the frame. There
is element f seriality in the repetition of structure and form, as
if, instead of trying to catalogue the world’s variety, Pardo were
trying to distill it, to acknowledge it while making it manageable.
I suspect that Conceptual art lies somewhere in his thinking; Joseph
Kosuth was one of his teachers at art school, and so, too, was Conceptually
influenced painter Jennifer Bartlett. (More influential still, surely,
was another of his teachers Richard Artschwager, whose stylized artifice
has offshoots in Pardo’s roses.) |
|
But there are precedents for the serial in the history of painting
itself, and you might think that Pardo, as a painter rather than a
Conceptualist or Minimalist, was simply experimenting with color in
these works, trying out how the same or similar red form looked against
cream, against yellow, against orange-yellow, against different shades
of blue. But that wouldn’t explain why he picked this form, the rose,
or why each image seems a condensation of the rose, disciplining or
focusing its aura tic association and histories without, however,
erasing them. And it wouldn’t explain the work’s emotional tone. Roses
have personal associations for Pardo, and he has worked with them
before, producing a series of rose paintings for an exhibition at
the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, in 1991. Those paintings
were intended as memorials in the AIDS crisis, “When my boyfriend
died”, says Pardo, “I went to my mother’s. I spent the entire summer
in her rose garden, up in Westchester, and she had these roses with
huge thorns with red tips. |
|