In this article about the exhibition of works by the Venezuelan painter and printmaker Mercedes Pardo at the Museo Alejandro Otero (Caracas 2000–2001), the curator Bélgica Rodríguez addresses three of what she describes as the major aspects of Pardo’s painting. She refers to color as a visual element, a mystic expression, and the repository of a collective imagination; the second aspect is “structure,” which she describes as the driving force behind Pardo’s painting since the 1960s; the third aspect is space, arranged unambiguously according to the canon of “cubic space” and as “universal space.” Rodríguez talks about Mercedes Pardo, referring to her perseverance and the sense of loneliness that “she conveys to us in every painting.” She concludes that Pardo’s work has, “like very few other examples, remained steadfast and faithful to her visual beliefs: the geometry of form and color.”

This article written by the curator Bélgica Rodríguez (b. 1941) about the exhibition of works by the painter and printmaker Mercedes Pardo (1921–2005)—at the Museo Alejandro Otero (Caracas 2000–2001)—originally appeared in the newspaper El Nacional (December 26, 2000) and was subsequently published in the exhibition catalogue in 2001. In the article, Rodríguez refers to “the great colorist of Venezuelan art,” and mentions the aspects of Pardo’s work (color and space) that attracted most attention among critics. Rodríguez makes an important contribution, however, when she points out that “structure” is the driving force in Pardo’s painting and is therefore—according to the critic—the key to analyzing her work since the 1960s. Rodríguez also observes that solid structure functions as a connecting thread in these works, prompting her to carry out a “rough analysis of the structure” in the paintings at the exhibition, beginning with Composición (1959) and ending with El desvelo o Contraste (2000). It was her “select retrospective” that led Rodríguez to discover this approach to analyzing Pardo’s work based on its “structure” and, from there, to arrive at certain conclusions, including: how the autonomy of forms in space has been a constant in this artist’s work; and how, in the early works, these forms were subject to color and steadily led to broad color planes, thus no longer being “geometric forms” and instead becoming “colored space.”  

To read the critical essay about this artist written by her lifelong companion, Alejandro Otero, and published in 1969, see “Mercedes Pardo: color de la serigrafía” [doc. no. 1143176].

To read other articles about Pardo, see Ruth Auerbach’s interview “La creación como argumento” [doc. no. 1143060]; the article by Roberto Guevara “Color y módulos en Mercedes Pardo” [doc. no. 1155991]; Margarita D’Amico’s interview “Mercedes Pardo: 1 x 9” [doc. no. 1155959]; the essay about the painter by Elizabeth Schon “La plenitud más plena” [doc. no. 1102269]; and the essayist María Fernanda Palacios’ piece about the painter “Pintura y vida” [doc. no. 1102253].