An Attempt to Use Abstract Art to Address Fundamental Questions about the Individual and Contemporary Society
“Reality depends more on the artist’s ability to communicate ideas or emotions rather than the simple or complex representation of what is visually perceived,” say the Pardo Brothers.
Javier and Miguel Ángel Pardo Ordóñez were born in Madrid, 1977. After graduating from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Madrid, they specialized in “Plastic Arts” six years later (2004), they obtained the degree of Doctor Cum Laude in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid in 2009. Currently, teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Madrid, UCM.
At the Faculty of Fine Arts, their pictorial training took place under an artistic philosophy marked by the teaching of the painter and teacher Florencio Galindo, as well as created the opportunity to connect with the Spanish realism of the time, such as José Hernández and Antonio López García, among others.
“From the first day we were accepted into the Faculty of Fine Arts, the Faculty showed us a vision of art that we were completely unaware of, ” say the Pardo Brothers.
Since their beginnings, the Pardo brothers have been faithful to their principles of this spirit, identifying themselves with this form of expression. During these years, they needed to learn the properties of the Spanish pictorial tradition, with Velázquez as its greatest exponent. Also, to appreciate the importance of this inheritance left by the master of ‘The Great Painting.’
The Pardo brothers studied contemporary 20th-century Spanish and American art. They were lured by the work of artists such as Pancho Cossío, Antoni Clavé, Lucio Muñoz, De Kooning, and Jim Dine, among others. During these years characterized by pictorial discoveries and contagions, they reaffirmed the Faculty as a place of essential learning and experience, becoming the ideal space for their pictorial research and training.
“Reality depends more on the artist’s ability to communicate ideas or emotions rather than the simple or complex representation of what is visually perceived,” say the Pardo Brothers.
Their real discovery was of abstract realism influenced by Weyth to Barceló. They describe that “this reality does not exist in the work of art, in the support, in the painting; what exists is our reality that of each one of us. It is its greatness and its mystery. Making the body visible, its incorporeal essence”.
In art, reality is much more complex and subjective than what is conventionally understood by assimilating it only with figuration. In the painting of the Pardo brothers, reality is only the starting point, whereby they can express and materialize specific intangible values such as emotion, mystery, environment, or atmosphere, concepts that cannot be felt or touched but can be “painted”. They show us the difference between things that belong to a reason and things that really belong to senses; in other words, the difference between things that are and the things that are really seen. Therefore, abstraction becomes the ideal path toward researching, analyzing, and studying such intangible values.
“Painting is the material that reveals all its mysteries and its encounters with palpable, physical, and sensitive reality. Deeping as deeply as possible into the matter of nature, or rather to “emerge” from this matter, is for us, a real plastic discovery. Since the most personal heart of things to capture a visible reality. Incessant research for the sense of the presence of things,” say Pardo brothers.
Furthermore, the meanings and iconographic subjects of the work try to answer fundamental questions about the individual and today’s society.
“Our idea or thought is based precisely on the fact that life itself and our profession are the cause and meaning of our painting. This is how we write our life. Our works do not stop being written reflections that reflect a small, unimportant world but are essential for us because it is what you are living. At least, it is the life you choose that identifies you as an individual”.
Their attitude towards the painting is always non-conformist and, with a certain rebelliousness, becomes a constant whose argument is to give evidence of the loss of values and “conflicts” in our society, making a mark forever on the epidermis of the painting (regrets, testimonies, padlocks that suggest certain prohibitions, graffiti that suggest that the artist is a “man of the cloth”). The work of the Pardo brothers is far from being a “friendly” painting where the surfaces speak for themselves.
“These surfaces disclose to us that beauty can be discovered in the most personal realities closest to the artist,” they conclude.
“Painting is the material that reveals all its mysteries and its encounters with palpable, physical, and sensitive reality,” said Pardo brothers.