Perrotin is happy to current the gallery’s first exhibition with California-based painter Alex Gardner, titled Psychic Stamina. As a pure observer, the artist is serious about relationships, which he captures by way of obscured encounters that stay common of their ambiguity. Emphasised with a vivid coloration palette, the artist explores psychological fatigue in a world polluted with data.
Gardner’s new physique of labor is each inherently optimistic and wholly voracious. His work supply the straightforward but tender notion of artwork as solace, by way of encounters which can be concurrently estranged but achingly acquainted. In America, belonging can typically appear simply out of attain, together with for Gardner himself who’s bi-racial. Such is current in a society the place every perspective has its personal extremities, isolating the proverbial different. When our burdens turn into more and more laborious to bear, the exhibition’s title, Psychic Stamina, suggests, house would possibly merely be present in one’s personal head and coronary heart.
In a rustic which sees itself as two colours, and the place civility–like an endangered species–grows more and more uncommon, Gardner’s work open an area of reflection. Who’re we and the place can we go from right here?
Gardner’s enigmatic work is provocative and unsettling with out being confrontational, as exemplified by Endurance, the artist’s foray into sculpture which is positioned on the entrance of the exhibition. The bronze bench, within the likeness of a face-down particular person whose physique hangs between two reflective pillars, invitations guests to reply the query of how a lot weight can one bear alone?
That is Gardner’s simple energy–the flexibility to boost open- ended questions on our on a regular basis life, and the realities we inhabit, leaving every thing up for subjective interpretation. Plainly the inclined determine is enduring however we have no idea how or why he got here to be on this uncomfortable place. By inviting viewers to sit down on the determine, the artist is asking us to contemplate what toll our consolation takes on others. That is simply one of many many robust questions embedded in his work.
Gardner’s close-up views of cropped, featureless figures are each quick and cryptic. Many are actually and metaphorically untethered, as in Having fun with The Experience, No Prenupt For The Thrill, and Leveraged (Dwelling in The Crimson). In Exploding On The Launch Pad, a barefooted toddler in reddish-orange shorts and t-shirt is inexplicably rising into the air. Set towards a stable yellow floor, the portray of a bare-legged brown little one in shorts and a t-shirt marked by thick, drapery-like folds will also be learn as a portray of tonal relationships. As in his different work, the colour infuses the scene with an emotional tenor, on this case, childhood exuberance. And but, the longer we take a look at the portray, the extra ambivalent it turns into. Why is the kid rising into the air? Are the youngsters’s playroom colours joyful? Or do they call to mind the warmth of a conflagration?
Whereas the luminous monochromatic grounds of Gardner’s work evoke a anonymous summary, the untethered figures appear buoyant. They embody an ambiguity, between rising and falling, consolation and catastrophe. They evoke an in-between second, the place we can not deduce what occurred earlier than nor guess what’s going to occur subsequent. That is definitely true of Jungle (We Look Completely different to Every Different) and Leaves Falling Gently On My Corpse, the place intimate moments additionally really feel like ones of estrangement. Gardner pulls the viewer into the tight house of his work.
By edging the contour of the figures in pink or crimson, the photographic impact of halation endows his topics with an otherworldly, spectral luminosity. They exist in a world that’s adjoining to ours in recognizable apparel, however on the identical time, is distant and unreachable. They comply with an inside logic we can not discern, as in Jungle (We Look Completely different to Eachother), the place two an identical figures seem like urgent their faces into one another. One other determine, who’s dressed just like the others, seems to be standing on her palms, suggesting we’re a efficiency.
All over the place we flip in Gardner’s pastel-colored work, we encounter one thing we can not totally fathom. This resistance to labels conveys Gardner’s want for freedom, to not be trapped in classes or different individuals’s agendas. To realize that freedom requires stamina and endurance, which Gardner clearly possesses in these exceptional, enigmatic works. —John Yau