10.20.25 — Half Slave, Half Free
Paul Gardère is still trying to determine his heritage. Black and white, slave and free, Haitian and American—he takes it all personally and as part of his art. He layers on images and materials, as paint and assembly. He sees it all his by rights as a student of European art and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Is he still part of the picture? It gives more than one meaning to a show called “Second Nature,” at Magenta Plains through October 25.
Gardère has two of the gallery’s three floor, something of a rarity. This is the kind of artist still trying to cover it all and still looking for himself. With this much color and this much realism, it should not be difficult, and he starts a long time ago. A president calling to make America great again had better think again before. The artist may fairly think that he was there all along before a poor excuse for realism took over TV. He is also more part of the landscape, which plunges into depth and soaks up the light.
Just when you thought a landscape is fully observed along with the people in it, it leaps into depth and out of scale. You may recognize it as the art of museums, with nods to both sides of the oceans—in the Baroque and the Hudson River School. A French speaker can expect to evoke French drawing, and he cites Claude Lorrain and Paul Gauguin alike as influences, continuing into Post-Impressionism. If it seems exaggerated in earth, sea, and sky, Trump himself can hardly claim so much. Just how natural is it anyway? Just how painfully unnatural was the sugar trade and slavery?
But are they paintings or scrapbooks? Just what you felt sure he had taken a new leap into collectibles, he embeds rows of photos, sometimes with the illusion of picture frames. Zach Bruder has the third floor for more twists and turns constrained objects and twisted life. You may rightly have your suspicions. Is it right to imagine a heritage this way? What if it is a heritage in slavery?
I have my doubts. It could just be the artist’s way insisting that his history belongs to him. Just when it seemed certain that Gardère had switched entirely to photography, the painted surface becomes crustier than ever. As much as a third of a canvas may run to substance, glitter, and bright red. And then the protagonist in another painting, a boy, stands full height in another landscape still. Can he ever claim it as his own?
He cannot be so easy to identify, half slave or half free. The continent does not belong firmly to the viewer, the artist, or him. Other figures, like skaters in a classic Dutch landscape, remain colorless in which a title identifies as Exotic Garden but within little growing in the snow. A schematic black woman stands naked in what might be spring. They still cannot say for sure who owns the land and when it will be great again. I am not suggesting anytime soon.