To mark Jonathan Gardner’s illustration by the gallery, MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Distinctive in Paris may be very happy to host his first solo presentation, entitled Nonetheless Life. That includes two new works on canvas, Nonetheless Life is an open window into Gardner’s follow. Anchored in each day life, Gardner’s work are composed by no means from images, however from reminiscence. Shapes, figures and objects are introduced collectively in clear compositions, the place scale and perspective are delicately distorted to create a fancy layering of volumes, patterns and topics in rigorously contrasting colors. Deliberately formal, Gardner embraces the complexity of oil portray as a craft.
Within the works offered at Pièce Distinctive, Gardner addresses the canons of classicism in portray, from the “nonetheless life” to “the artist’s self-portrait with easel”. The result’s as surreal as it’s acquainted.
In Sacred Sleep, a brick-coloured desk with legs paying homage to Escher’s endless staircases units the stage for a subtly autobiographical still-life scene. Because the artist explains, not too long ago changing into the daddy of twins – and the sleep deprivation that ensued – has made each him and his associate fully rethink the significance of sleep. The superb line between acutely aware and unconscious, dream and actuality turns into gloriously blurred and is transposed onto this canvas: deceptively recognizable, every factor is infused with an aura of ambiguity.
On the middle of the composition, a female determine along with her again to the viewer, seemingly asleep, and unusually small as she in some way suits on the desk, may both be the topic from whose thoughts this dream-like scene emerges, or a part of the fantasy. The inexperienced pattern-like motif of nude hips in the back of the scene – or maybe above all of it – creates an excellent stronger sense of weird familiarity, like a transferring movie strip, rolling in a loop at the back of the thoughts as an unconscious erotic imaginative and prescient.
Peeking on the viewer from the again of a stretched canvas – which takes up greater than half of the portray’s floor – the artist, albeit positioned on the middle of Nonetheless Life Painter, seems solely tentatively as the topic of this bustling composition. Astutely, Jonathan Gardner guides the viewer’s gaze from one factor to the following, each framing the painter’s blue silhouette.
The attention travels from an oval crimson desk, up a skinny light-blue curtain, to a big inexperienced vase and yellow paintbrushes resting on an orange desk, to a lilac unstretched canvas, and again once more to the big, cross-shaped wood panels in the back of the mysterious canvas.
Drawn into the portray by the determine’s deep, easy gaze, it turns into unclear if the topic of the work in progress is the nonetheless life on the little crimson desk, or maybe the viewer, caught unawares. In each canvases, deceptively acquainted scenes naked a pleasant sense of unresolved thriller, lending the viewer a serving to hand into the realm of Jonathan Gardenr’s ingenious reconstructions of the creativeness.
