Mercedes Pardo, “Untitled,” unknown edition, 1998, serigraph on paper, 25 x 35 13/16 inches.
Geometric abstraction is historically connected to the search for purity by way of utopia, or vice versa. Reaching utopia through purity might be designated, in philosophical terms, as Platonic: it is an assent towards clarity that purifies the psyche of a citizen who then constructs an ideal, just state. To chase purity through utopia is decidedly Pythagorean: a community, constrained by the lifestyle choices of its main architect-ideologue, arrives at a method of behavior that instills, or tries to instill, a sense of individual spiritual order. In actual artworks, the difference is almost imperceptible without a deep dive into the artist’s past and the circumstances that made them. Still, it is an important, if wobbly, divide, and the traces of these distinctions are evident in a number of very different exhibitions that have opened simultaneously in Houston’s commercial spaces.
Installation view of “Mercedes Pardo: Color y Magia” at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, 2023.
Sicardi Ayers Bacino exhibits two Venezuelan artists of different generations, Mercedes Pardo (1921-2005) and Elias Crespin (b. 1965). What unites them are family ties to artists that are much more visible in the Anglo-Saxon museum context. Pardo was married to Alejandro Otero, who is well represented in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston collection; his work is always on view thanks to Vertical Vibrante, a gleaming mobile in the sculpture garden. Crespin is the grandson of Gego, a German immigrant to Latin America, who was widely exhibited in Europe and the U.S. thanks to a sustained interest in overlooked female artists. The radiation of these close relationships did not strip them of their own ideas. Pardo commanded color subtleties that are all but absent in Otero’s work. Unlike Gego, Crispin prefers clean lines and grids.
Installation view of “Mercedes Pardo: Color y Magia” at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, 2023.
Apart from being someone’s someone, they both are driven by the real-world physicality of geometric shapes. Pardo’s show consists of one painting and several serigraph prints, produced over two decades. Her evolution is clear-cut. The earliest work, from the mid-1970s, is rhythmically precise and has a discernible coordinate grid. Later, at the tall end of the 1980s, biomorphic forms start to slip in, the color combinations sometimes creating a recognizable effect of a thick Southern sunset or a column of light in the morning forest. In Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, arguably the North American letters’ most piercing depiction of artistic failure, one of the protagonists professes his inability to create something “alive and shocking enough” to stand beside someone’s “most ordinary morning.” Through her exceptional sensitivity to tone and light, displayed through an almost synesthetic command of deep blues, greens, reds, and golds, Pardo does just that: a series of very recognizable “ordinary mornings,” without ever recursing to the simple landscape half-and-half formula of earth and sky.
Installation view of “Elias Crespin: Tempomorphosis” at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, 2023.
Crespin’s show on the second floor of the gallery is titled Tempomorshosis and presents programmed mobiles made between 2013 and the present day. The artist studied computer engineering, and it shows: his algorithmic sculpture is made from elements that wouldn’t look out of place in a tech start-up office. The exhibition text by Domitille d’Orgeval connects his staging of simple geometric elements to Crespin’s interest in cosmic mechanics. Exploring alternate states of chaos and system, the artist uses geometry to construct models of aesthetic atoms. It is décor with a message — the universe is cold but beautiful, and understanding this is the choosiest of pleasures that can potentially be shared with the moon, the stars, the birds, and the bees, as all of them are animated by the same equations.
Installation view of “Elias Crespin: Tempomorphosis” at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, 2023.
The two artists are as far from a clearly defined political message as possible, but the echoes of abstraction’s pointed relevance to social issues reverberate in their self-contained pieces. Pardo was part of Venezuelan informalism movement with Otero, Jesus Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz Diez, and others. Ideas of European Marxism circulated freely among the artists of the era, and the close attention they gave to promises of cybernetics, a discipline that might have installed an impersonal and progressive social order in the place of capitalism and nepotism, influenced their drift towards geometry. There is no capital ‘I’ in cybernetics, and that means no personality cults of either dictators or robber barons. Artificial intelligence policy was never implemented, alas, but the idealism lives on uncontested precisely because it’s Platonic — a utopia that is locked on the horizon.
A very different set of principles guides Art Blocks, a company that commissions, promotes, and sells generative digital art as NFTs. A selection of work from their website is part of an optimistically titled show, Collecting The Future: Photography and Generative Art on the Blockchain, at Assembly gallery. Assembly has its own NFT marketplace, Assembly Curated, so a collaboration seems logical. On Curated, the gallery sells work by its interesting roster of photographers and uses NFTs as just another route of distribution that gives a conveniently verified option for those who want digital ownership. Not a lot of pieces in the Assembly section deal with the conflicts and glitches that arise when an image becomes vulnerable to algorithmic manipulation, but they don’t have to be — they look good as straight photography and pretty much function similarly through any light source.
“Collecting the Future: Photography and Generative Art on the Blockchain” on view at Assembly. Photo: Peter Molick, courtesy of Assembly.
As is customary for many Silicon Valley playgrounds, starting with the internet itself, NFT rhetoric is a libertarian mix of infinite possibility and prosperity gospel, a promise of the “new” that often ends up meaning “new markets” and “new commodities.” What’s really interesting about most of the work in the show is that it looks classically Modernist. The references the artists use are tried and true: Bauhaus, Durer, Leonardo. Matt DesLauriers’ Meridian #299 could be a Dorothy Hood abstraction, but it’s available only to the owners of the underlying NFT. Esthetically, the work here feels as if it was designed at the dawn of visual computation, and in some cases that’s almost true. Polychrome Music #197 is center-stage at the show, a rainbow-colored geometric multivitamin for the eyes from net art veteran and Bring Your Own Beamer founder Rafael Rozendaal (first work: 2001) in collaboration with techno pioneer LegoWelt (first release: 1999).
Another significant piece, Primitives, is by a different duo: Aranda/Lasch established themselves as pre-eminent algorithmic designers a couple of decades ago and even have work collected by MoMA (though the pieces in the museum are not purely machine-made, but created in collaboration with Terrol Dew Johnson, an indigenous weaver who is part of the Tohono O’odham people). Primitives richly encapsulates the many contractions of geometric generative art. It is a “quasicrystal” that never repeats its “structural pattern” twice, but exists in an edition of 400, a little short of infinity. It can be viewed on a screen or saved as an .obj file for later 3D printing, thus traversing the border between digital and physical in a manner that requires integration in finite space.
The artists weave a wonderful story around the work, evoking Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholy as inspiration. Interestingly, the editors of Arturo, Argentine’s trailblazing abstract art publication of 1944 that made waves all over South America, called for “the negation of all melancholy,” deeming it unconducive to societal health. Aranda/Lasch praise algorithm and code as tools of today’s “geometers and mystics,” and that gives their practice a decidedly Pythagorean taste of alchemy in bits and bytes. They even have a closed community of the work’s owners in Discord, a popular chat platform for gamers that is often used by crypto entrepreneurs, building an internal circle for the chosen few.
“Collecting the Future: Photography and Generative Art on the Blockchain” on view at Assembly. Photo: Peter Molick, courtesy of Assembly.
All the NFTs in Collecting The Future are for sale in Ethereum. True to its pre-Einstein name, it is a magical currency that can soar 46% to USD during the day and then ebb right back, as if following the phases of the moon. It fits perfectly with the kind of delightfully, wacky objectives that a stereotypical Silicon Valley seeker pursues — personal immortality, post-human omniscience, and the philosopher’s stone that can turn data into cash.
It’s curious how both the Venezuelan music of the spheres at Sicardi Ayers Bacino and generative NFTs at Assembly are in essence byproducts of large computational projects. The difference in correlation between private and public interests in Utopian cybernetics and Silicon Valley start-ups allows for slight variations in the effects the art can produce, or, at least, promise to produce. For Pardo and Crespin, it’s magical transformations of spacetime. In the NFT community, it’s the vaguely defined ‘future’ that is waiting to be ‘collected.’ The choice is a matter of taste, of course, but also a bit of an existential choice.
Collecting the Future: Photography and Generative Art on the Blockchain is on view at Assembly in Houston through July, 22, 2023
Mercedes Pardo: Color y Magia is on view through July 6, 2023 and Elias Crespin: Tempomorphosis is on view through August 3, 2023, both at Sicardi Ayers Bacino in Houston.
