Born in Cuenca (Ecuador) in 1965, Pablo Cardoso
is currently the Ecuadorian artist with the most
important international projection. In 2001, on
occasion of the 7th Cuenca Biennial, Cardoso presented
Geodesia, the pictorial installation
opening his “Journeys” series which
the jury also awarded with an Honorable Mention.
We can already find here several consistencies
from his recent work: the use of photographs without
focus –in the style of the blurred paintings
by Gerhard Richter or Gottfried Helnwein–
as a model of painting, the idea of photographic
sequence and the selection of black and white,
are strategies that allow for a certain analytical
distance from the real data. Later on came the
cycles 29.IV.02, 18.VI.02 (titles that
refer to the dates in which the artist had two
walking tours through his city) and Far-near-far
(2004), the works presented at the Gwangju Biennial
(South Korea) and São Paulo (Brazil). These
were followed by the series Coordenadas
(a splendid collection of sea-scapes and jungle
scenes), Sheets, Abyss-Desert-Sea (2006)
and FF (2006). What all these had in
common was departing from a photographic register
taken by the artist during his walks or trips,
which were then “re-told” through
what Cardoso calls a “literal brush”,
that is, a brush that textually and patiently
copies each photo.
In these works, Cardoso develops a secret poetic
of passages, corridors, highways and sidewalks,
transit locations that become metaphors of the
experience of fugacity; places that are susceptible
to the manifestations of epiphany. Cardoso exacerbates
the melancholy and emotions of dejà-vu
which wrap up these anonymous locations making
them strange and opaque –by sliding the
focus lens–, as a way to resist the innocuous
and loud transparencies of the media, into the
visual saturation they enable, into the speed
of real and virtual highways. Everything he procures,
facing the loss of contemporary life substance,
is to return to the human being and things their
density, their mystery, their silence, their slow
pace and essential opacities; to give them back
their ontological plenitude.
Cardoso´s recent work, created during the
present year, which is the focus of his exhibition
at galería dpm, is the trilogy Abismo-Desierto-Mar
(Abyss-Desert-Sea). We are before a cycle of journeys
departing from his home towards three locations
at short distance in whose path the landscape
changes bit by bit until transforming dramatically.
These locations where nothing happens or nothing
seems to happen, become proper places for metaphysical
revelations to occur. In these landscapes otherness
–reminding us of lonely and melancholic
landscapes in romantic paintings– we speak
to the other: the void, the death.
It is possible to establish an analogy between
this trilogy and the filmmaking genre of road-movie,
were characters get immersed in a series of exterior
situations. Rather different from these films,
in Cardoso´s road-pictures all
the adventures are interior ones, they show the
randomness of the fascination look at landscape
mutations, with the changing atmospheres and climates,
but also the tribulations of conscience that reflects
upon the un-interrupted course of life.
The quick and ravenous passing of time, resides
the need to capture its essence, are maybe the
major subjects and mobiles of this obsessive and
meticulous artist.
Text by Cristóbal Zapata.
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Click
on images to enlarge
Pablo Cardoso,
Abismo (Abyss), 2006,
acrylic on wood
(one of the 50 pieces
in the group) 4 x 6 in.
Pablo Cardoso,
Mar (Sea), 2006,
acrylic on wood
(one of the 50 pieces
in the group) 4 x 6 in..
Pablo Cardoso,
Abismo (Abyss)
fragment, 2006,
acrylic on wood, 50
pieces of 4 x 6 in. each
Pablo Cardoso,
Desierto (Desert)
fragment, 2006,
acrylic on wood,
50 pieces of
4 x 6 in. each
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