ALEX GARDNER: PSYCHIC STAMINA
Perrotin is pleased to announces Psychic Stamina by the artist Alex Gardner. As a natural observer, the artist is interested in relationships, which he captures through obscured encounters that remain universal in their ambiguity.
June 1 - July 26, 2024
Gardner’s new body of work is both inherently optimistic and wholly voracious. His paintings offer the simple yet tender notion of art as solace, through encounters that are simultaneously estranged yet achingly familiar. In America, belonging can often seem just out of reach, including for Gardner himself who is bi-racial.
Gardner’s enigmatic work is provocative and unsettling without being confrontational, as exemplified by Endurance, the artist’s foray into sculpture which is placed at the entrance of the exhibition. The bronze bench, in the likeness of a face-down individual whose body hangs between two reflective pillars, invites visitors to answer the question of how much weight can one bear alone?
Gardner’s close-up views of cropped, featureless figures are both immediate and cryptic. Many are literally and metaphorically untethered, as in Enjoying The Ride, No Prenup For The Thrill, and Leveraged (Living in The Red). In Exploding On The Launch Pad, a barefooted toddler in reddish-orange shorts and t-shirt is inexplicably rising into the air.
While the luminous monochromatic grounds of Gardner’s paintings evoke a nameless abstract, the untethered figures seem buoyant. They embody an ambiguity, between rising and falling, comfort and disaster. They evoke an in-between moment, where we cannot deduce what happened before nor guess what will happen next.
By edging the contour of the figures in pink or red, the photographic effect of halation endows his subjects with an otherworldly, spectral luminosity. They exist in a world that is adjacent to ours in recognizable attire, but at the same time, is remote and unreachable. They follow an interior logic we cannot discern, as in Jungle (We Look Different to Eachother), where two identical figures appear to be pressing their faces into each other.
Everywhere we turn in Gardner’s pastel-colored paintings, we encounter something we cannot fully fathom. This resistance to labels conveys Gardner’s desire for freedom, to not be trapped in categories or other people’s agendas. To achieve that freedom requires stamina and endurance, which Gardner clearly possesses in these remarkable, enigmatic works.