Jonathan Gardner, Connection, 2016
I visited Jonathan Gardner’s studio in the summer while he was finishing the pieces for his first solo show at Casey Kaplan Gallery. His tight, meticulous, and refined technique stroked me during this visit. Today most of the paintings that we encounter in galleries in New York City have remnants of abstract expressionism, usually gestural, not only lacking the complexity in technique, but also with a careless that today most of us would describe as coolness. This laid back attitude mostly refers to Italo Calvino’s idea of the lightness of being Six Memos for the Next Millennium and today is carried within the art world by the creative petit bourgeois. Contrary to this attitude Jonathan’s paintings have a restriction that I relate to spatial anxiety.
Most of Gardner pieces are Baroque in composition -a Deluzian notion of baroque or spatial thoughts that inflect into themselves to then expand into something else. There is always something bending into itself- bodies, objects and spaces, and from these three physical manifestations the spatial shifts are the ones that interest me the most. I will use as a reference the painting Connection (2016). As we look closely, there are doublings that appear to be mirror reflections like the spaces are bending into themselves. But they are not exactly mirrored; they are shifting in time more in the category of film. What we are looking at are the frames of the celluloid entering and leaving the picture plane. The notion of narrative in these paintings seem to be more with the cinematic point of view, but from a physical standpoint- one frame after another quasi-identical, each one of them have various seconds before or after the main scene.
Even the background in the main scene seems to double, but then again it is not- in the left part of the scene we see the head looking at the other head -stepping out of itself, while the hand sticks out from the main hand- this type of shift it is not based in real logic. The reasoning in this case is fractured, disjointed. This is a psychological space more than a real one; it is a psychosomatic encasement for the viewer to enter this non-logical and fractured space.
R.
