In the gallery space of Jorge Pardo's new show.

In the gallery space of Jorge Pardo's new show, visitors confronted four wagers of vibrant red, yellow and orange double-hung doors. Created not at home of medium- density fiberboard and machine-shaped to bring forth a high-relief texture of drapery-like undulating bend s they are punctured by large symmetrical protozoa-shaped Plexiglas windows in the same colors as their bright enamel surfaces. Reminiscent of ultra-design '70 decor, the doors are full functional, with working hardware, hinges and knobs, and were either attached directly to a blank wall or serv as portals to the gallery's other rooms

Hung and displayed as artworks yet employed like utilitarian objects, the doors exemplify Pardo's manner of pressing at the boundaries between art and architecture, craft and industrial design, formalism and functionalism. He achieved a similar validity in Project (2000), a redesign of the discrete spaces of the Dia Center's groundfloor gallery, bookstore and lobby into a single citrus-hued entity with a continuous tile floor. Other latter category-crossing works include a redwood pier that continueed like a modest earthwork, into the Aasee in Munster (1997) a functional yet temporarily "sculptural" white sailboat that the artist dry-deck at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (1997) and a house he designed in the tower Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles (1998) Pardo lived in the house while it serv as a public/private annex of MOCA, without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw with uniformed guards and an exhibit of his confess handblown glass on loan from Rotterdam.

Not in the same manner much concerned to elevate craft or design in consequence of association with high art as to infuriate an open-ended experience in viewers confronting the conjunction of these different institutional and cultural forms, Pardo's work alludes to the two the materials and fabrication techniques of Minimalism and its emphasis in succession the constitutive role played on a viewer. But in Pardo's novel show, the audience's interaction with the work is more than phenomenological: single actually opens the doors, equal if they lead to nowhere, or, as in the case of the other major piece forward view, a large-scale sunroom, single actually occupies the work.

The sunroom built from birch plywood with porthole windows and notches filled from colored Plexiglas, has a prefabricated appearance, as if ready to be disassembled and construct agained anywhere. Yet in its topsy-turvy roofline and Gaudiesque kaleidoscopic interior (layers of natural light colored through the windows overlap on its walls), the construction proclaims its status as singular and handmade. And, as in other creations at Pardo, the sunroom is suspended between the perspectives of utility and delectation, housing, like a gallery within the gallery, its hold works within: an inkjet-on-paper artwork and a cot [i]or[/i] coteed paper lamp that can be approached as autonomous esthetic targets or just anonymous items of interior design.

--Jonathan Gilmore

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