Casey Kaplan
New York Art Galleries: What to See Right Now
March 21, 2019
By Roberta Smith
It’s time for some big museum to summon its nerve, take off its blinkers and account for the rash of representational and specifically figurative painting going on right now. Jonathan Gardner’s impressive second New York solo show is one of numerous cases in point. The stylish, stylized paintings in “Desert Wind” are wry, lush and pleasurable in their beauty and their brains. With figures who recline, make love or smoke a hookah in luxurious interiors or hidden gardens, Mr. Gardner’s subject may be reverie or maybe indolence, solitary or not, clothed or nude, at home, but mostly, it seems, abroad. Perhaps he intends these quiet carefree scenes to distract us from how carefully he engineers every composition. If so, he succeeds: It takes a while to understand their formal complexity.
The new works improve on those in Mr. Gardner’s first solo show, also at this gallery, in 2016. The art references have become more subtle. A table leg evokes Brancusi; a red rug may allude to Donald Judd’s early reliefs. Equally important: Pictorial space is now carefully controlled — and mostly flattened out of existence. The compositions present nearly solid fronts of rectilinear elements that push forward, regardless of whether they define tiled floor, wood-grain table tops, a garden wall, or another scene that could be the view from a picture window or a painting within a painting.
Mr. Gardner’s engineering grants each element as much autonomy as possible. Plated food and grouped objects form small, independent still lifes. In “Visions of the Emerald Beyond,” a bright orange striped textile has the punch of an abstract painting, even if a woman in a lavender bikini bottom reclines on it. The waiters’ blue jackets in “The Waiter” and “The Ballroom” have deeper-blue shadows that evoke clouds in a night sky. All the paintings’ parts are kept in check, just this side of mutiny.