Gardner's paintings and drawings conjure invented universes. The artist's compositions recall figures and objects familiar yet obscure, anchored by modern art history as well as fabrications of the artist’s mind. The subjects are nameless characters participating in a larger narrative that feels simultaneously familiar and strange. Frozen in time, elongated and exaggerated women of leisure occupy imagined interior spaces and exterior landscapes, as if participants in ambiguous scenes of fantasy and mystery. As Roberta Smith writes in her 2019 New York Times review of the artist's solo exhibition, Desert Wind at Casey Kaplan, "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.”
With various stylistic influences, Gardner’s work merges geometric structure with surrealism, more recently incorporating peculiar framing devices and collage techniques to further complicate the picture plane. The illusionary worlds of Jim Nutt, Balthus, Léger, Picasso and Matisse are present and timeless, only to be manipulated by techniques reminiscent of tromp l’oeil.