Jorge Pardo’s ‘Folly’ turns empty shell into an eyeful of art at UH
architecturally inventive structure floats just above the ground on a steel base, as if it was hauled in on a trailer. (It wasn’t, or at least not in one piece.) Angled steel struts support its generous roof overhang. With an inset door and several pop-outs, it has more than four corners of floor-toceiling windows.
Clad in utilitarian, weatherproof panels, with shallow wood ramps leading to the doors, the building has an unfinished aura outside. But step in, and pow! You’re immersed in 600 square feet of happy feels.
The interior walls — all composed of painted wood panels — have a hallucinatory effect, as if they’re catching a gazillion bits of daylight and shadow. Since each wall is framed by windows, the paintings constantly dance with whatever’s happening outdoors. In the middle of the space, bulbous yet airy chandeliers dangle like exotic flowers or massive jellyfish — a Jorge Pardo signature involving hundreds of stacked, laser-cut vinyl disks.
“Technically, this is an outdoor sculpture. But it’s putting the outdoors in, blending your experience. I was looking for how you can convolute that to some degree and make it interesting,” Pardo told me a few days before “Folly” opened.
Commissioned by the University of Houston’s public art program as a temporary work for a grassy patch of Wilhelmina’s Grove between the Moores Opera House and the Blaffer Art Museum, the sleek little pavilion opened Oct. 19 and will remain up through 2023.
Pardo, 59, famously blends architecture, design, sculpture and painting into a technologydriven practice he cheerfully calls a “little bit of an odd repertoire.” He made his first professional works in the late 1980s from everyday objects. Among other things, he rethought a refrigerator by painting its door blue, made a wall assemblage of lumber scraps, refitted a ladder with rare wood and turned a plastic garden owl into a pinhole camera.
As his view broadened, he began to see entire spaces as his canvas. While he also produces traditional paintings, sculptures and installations, his biggest works have included his first home in Los Angeles, initially commissioned by the L.A. County Museum of Art; a residential compound in Malibu for the art book publisher Benedikt Taschen; a hacienda in Merída, Mexico; and L’Arlatan, a hotel in Arles, France, built recently by the Swiss heiress and art patron Maja Hoffmann. Pardo lives in homes of his own design in New York and Merída, where his studio employs more than a dozen people who are like family.
Writers describing Pardo’s environments often tag them as “exuberant.” They’re fantastical and over the top — contemporary Baroque, you could say — but with a distinctly global warmth that’s never intimidating. “I’m always trying to think about how objects that aren’t paintings can be structured to somehow become more intensely optical,” Pardo said.
Like many UH students, he is an immigrant — “a very happy American immigrant,” he said. Born in Havana, Cuba, he grew up in Chicago and studied biology at the University of Illinois before finding his way to art. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., in the late 1980s, where he absorbed conceptual art and the earthworks of Robert Smithson. (Pardo’s teachers included the influential avant-gardist Mike Kelis ley.)
In a video made by the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded him a “genius grant” in 2010, Pardo explains that he comes from a working-class background: “I never really understood there were these cultural professions people could assimilate into. When I went to college, those options opened up, and I just kind of ran with it.”
That’s one of the important aspects of public art at UH, said María Gatzambide, chief curator of the university’s permanent collection and public art program. Pardo’s “Folly” could be the first art some people see, she noted. “He wanted it to be welcoming, fun, light and not dense. He engages with conceptualism and AngloAmerican minimalism, but his personality is quite the oppoThe site. He is also very much aware of the Baroque and how it can be fertile for him. All of that comes into play here.”
When the Brown Foundation funded UH’s temporary public art program in 2018, Pardo was one of the first artists Gatzambide invited to participate. She appreciates how his work fuses technology, low-tech craftsmanship, complexity and playfulness. She also wanted to support Pardo’s artistic growth, as she did for Marta Chilindron in 2019 with the program’s first commission for Wilhelmina’s Grove, “Mobius Houston.”
“Folly” is Pardo’s largest “pure art” installation to date. It easy to imagine events happening inside, and I expect it will be in demand for classes and performances. Historically, however, follies are ornamental garden structures designed to delight and surprise those who happen upon them. Wealthy landowners made them a thing in the 18th century, when it was big fun to evoke ancient ruins, temples or pagodas in your green space if you had money to burn.
“The thing about follies is, their purpose is always in question,” Pardo said. “It’s turning a building into a visual object; not something that’s shelter, necessarily.” His “Folly” has a very particular visual invitation, he said. “You’re basically asked to kind of stroll through and spend time there and let yourself be absorbed by what the space feels like.”
Like many of his works, it also toes a line between technology and the handmade. Pardo composed the panel paintings from many layers of images from disparate sources — historical abstract paintings, photographs from his cellphone and his drawings made with Illustrator software among them — then threw it all “into the blender,” he said.
Stand back, and a few figures and objects within the colorful cacophony slowly reveal themselves. (I sussed out a couch, a bed and a rider on a bicycle.)
Closer up, his process captures the eyes: The images are incised into the panels. You could be looking at a camouflage-inspired jigsaw puzzle or a huge paint-by-number project. He could easily print his final images as wallpaper, but having assistants paint them by hand makes a more interesting experience. As with any abstract painting, he said, “It’s very important that something happens when you’re far away, and when you’re close.”
His chandeliers look biomorphic but are more randomly inspired by forms Pardo generates on a computer, using 3D as his sketching tool. Their colors unfold during a prototype phase, when he sees opportunities for layering. Narrow painted rods hang from them like danglers, their striped colors blending with the wall panels behind them.
All of his work is a continuum, Pardo said. “This ‘Folly’ piece might generate drawings, because I recycle images … as ingredients for new images. There’s always something in everything that’s part of something else.” He started to go on, then stopped short.
“I have a very short attention span,” he said, laughing. “All these different things are really helpful to me.”