Paint like you were a student.

In making art, there are dictums that resonate within the painter’s life generally acquired from the beginning stages of one’s craft: while in school or while in training. But there is something contrary from an instruction that reverts to a time that, for most artists, meant uncertainty and stretches of indecision.

Such advice was given to Pardo de Leon through her dream by her mentor, the late Roberto Chabet, two years after his death; and such advice was announced to her—an artist who had almost three decades worth of experience painting and exhibiting works in numerous galleries—as a moment of paradox where guidance from a mentor came neither from the student’s memory nor the teacher’s own wish. But it is a postscript, however, to the ties that bind the mentor and his student even if through imagination or the random calls of the psyche. It is a bridge, nonetheless, to the ever-increasing gap between influence and identity. And we are fortunate, as perpetual students of art, to be able to cross this bridge through a series of pillars through the artworks we make—and in this case, what Pardo de Leon made when she chose to pay heed to this enigmatic instruction.                      

In Pardo de Leon’s Meeting Rivers, she looks back into an art practice that started in 1986—her final year as a student—and the year after, which would be the year of her first solo exhibition. “These new paintings are like letters to my younger self,” she admits. “The process is akin to making new memories out of old.” These memories of her work involve a technique of what was described then as a ‘paraphrasing’ of the classical styles in painting. She renders her figures through the style of the old European Masters while borrowing themes and closing in on their images and leitmotifs. An ambiguity is reached within the relation of images across the plane mainly through what has been referred to as ‘juxtapositions,’ or the positioning of different elements next to each other. But past the artifices of placement comes a more theoretically demanding scheme that follows the concepts of ‘substitution,’ where our expectations from such a canonic artifact are offset by a seamless, organic flow of composition—translating the whole aura of a tradition into the bafflements of the postmodern: it is as if we are also forced to make new memories out of old.

Old and new memories and old and new practices are intertwined within Pardo de Leon’s art, which is in itself a throwback to her personal journey as an artist. It is a way of confronting herself, her work as an artist, or a way of returning. Although she herself admits: you can’t look in the same mirror twice.

And in the same breath, “one can’t cross the same river twice.” Yet in Pardo de Leon’s dreams, the river flows repeatedly through recurring messages from her beloved teacher who told her, “paint like you were a student”—blurring two streams of consciousness that flow from her own voice and from his. And from the time she wakes up, like an erratic dream, she chances upon another happy accident: when she began to check unopened emails, she found a letter sent by Roberto Chabet left unclicked for more than two years that started with the lines of a James McLaughlin verse: