| MANUEL
PARDO IS GAY, CUBAN, AND A PAINTER. He loves his mother, knows it’s
a queer cliché, and offers no apologies. Rather, Pardo celebrates
both his mother and his queerness, reveling in the cliches and transforming
them into the vocabulary of his art. Emigrating from Cuba in 1962
at the age of ten, Pardo left behind both his father and Fidel’s Castro’s
Communist regime to start a new life abroad in New York City. He narrates
a classic tale of motherly self-sacrifice with passion, a personal
saga to rival Stella Dallas, and has commemorated his filial devotion
in a series of paintings entitled My Mother and I in Technicolor.
“These paintings are about my mother’s life in America,” Pardo says
with emotion. “When we got here she spoke no English; she was a medical
professional and a professional midwife, but was forced to take work
as a factory laborer. My father stayed behind in Cuba- he was a Communist,
that was his right; but my mother sent my sister and I on ahead and
followed later, and when she got here her only priority was to see
that we got educated. |
| Toward
that end, she worked 16 hours a day for more than 20 years so that
we would have the advantages to succeed in this new society. “It sounds
like a joke,” Pardo laughs, “but I always say that she raised us by
telephone. Every time my mother got a break at work, she’d call to
make sure we were OK. It was her incredible dedication that gave me
the will to succeed. Some people might say that it’s a parent’s duty
to make sacrifices, but my mother went way beyond the call of duty
as far as I’m concerned. To me she is nothing less than a hero. “What
can I do to give back to her portion of what she has given to me?”
Pardo asks rhetorically. |
| “That’s
why I’ve invented this device, these paintings- Mother and I- to be
not just about my ego, but about her, to try to make history understand
what a woman can do, and will do, for her family.” Pardo’s paintings
idealize their subject with elaborate hairdos and wardrobe, posing
her as carefully as Ingres posed his duchesses, and are executed in
folk-art style that references Frida Kahlo, I Love Lucy, and Carmen
Miranda, in a color palette straight out of a 1950s melodrama with
color by Deluxe. “Technicolor- that’s the tint of the times I grew
up in,” Pardo laughs, “the late 50s, Hollywood, Lana Turner… Even
though I wasn’t living in the middle of that movie culture, it’s the
one I raised with. Good old American Technicolor is the same whether
you’re in New York, Miami or Havana- it’s bigger than life. |
| And
again, I like to return to the cliches for inspiration- gay men have
historically been in the service of women as hairdressers, fashion
designers, make up men, and such, so I’ve taken it one step further
by merging my personality with the portraits of my mother. I like
to take the old cliches and wave them like banners- it is about a
queer and his mother. “There is a gay sensibility that’s not just
about penises and handcuffs, and I’ve made it my job to see that there
will continue to be. |
|
That’s why my new series of paintings is called the ‘Mary’ series,
as in ‘Oh, Mary, don’t ask.’” Movie queens of the world may rest easy
knowing that old-school queer aesthetics are secure for another generation,
and the mothers of America should build a shrine to Manuel Pardo,
a mama’s boy who’s loud and proud. Mother, now 70, lives in Westchester
with her daughter, and she couldn’t be prouder. My Mother and I in
Technicolor: Paintings by Manuel Pardo runs September 19- October
19, 1996 at Griffin Linton Contemporary Exhibitions in Venice, California.
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