In this article for El Nacional’s Artes Plásticas section, art critic Roberto Guevara analyzes both paintings and screenprints by modernist artist Mercedes Pardo. His view is introduced with a reflection on the ongoing “search for a subjective security,” which is deemed highly topical in the twentieth century for critics and audiences. Guevara centers his focus on Pardo’s work through some words of the French writer René Char, believing that poets do not retain what they discover. In this idea of loss, however, lies the innovative aspect of a work, so that it is applied to Pardo’s approach to art as a living and evolving experience. The critic discusses the multifarious facets of her art production, thus giving examples of both the Signes series and her architectural proposals of art integration. According to him, a pair of key aspects summarize her project: constructive color and the pictorial space therein.

Although most of this article is a broad delving into the encompassing work of the Venezuelan modernist painter Mercedes Pardo (1921–2005), in the last paragraph, art critic Roberto Guevara refers to “this exhibition,” with no further mention or even details. Given the date of the article, it is a reference to her February 1977 exhibition titled Mercedes Pardo, displayed at Galería Adler/Castillo, Caracas, and shown months later at Centro Arte El Parque in Valencia, Venezuela.

Guevara defines his insightful argument as a “gigantic misunderstanding” of the twentieth century: a usual proneness to label experiences and categorize creative proposals. This, he argues, is due to our search for “a sense of security” that equally affects art critics and audiences as human beings. He quotes René Char in order to understand such a sense of loss that brings aside a certain kind of “novelty,” a discovery that soon disappears. This allows Guevara to highlight how ephemeral creative discoveries are. By means of research and development, Pardo’s art escapes categorization due to its multiplicity of approaches and forms. In reference to her series Signes (1964), he delves into the variations of her zodiac signs created through ink prints of ordinary household objects (nails and needles, rice, or lentils) that was published in twelve books. Pardo’s architectural integrations to art are seen as an overt opposition to the previous experience with signs, she goes from small works (edited into volumes) to huge artworks in an urban scale, thus implying a quite different involvement with her audiences. According to him, both the centrality of color and the space resulting from it epitomize Pardo’s art proposal. All these insights are re-elaborated by Guevara in a 1979 article written for her first retrospective exhibition at the GAN (Galería de Arte Nacional) in Caracas, titled Color: Piel, Presencia Meditada: Mercedes Pardo [see ICAA Digital Archive (doc. no. 1331315)].

For another review of this exhibition at Galería Adler/Castillo, see Roberto Montero Castro, “Mercedes Pardo nueva síntesis del color” (doc. no. 1331548). For a thorough perception of her art as shown in the 1991 retrospective Moradas del Color, see Gloria Carnevali, “El Espacio en la pintura de Mercedes Pardo” (doc. no. 1102285); and María Fernanda Palacios, “Pintura y vida” (doc. no. 1102253).