JONATHAN GARDNER

Across the paintings, a landscape opens where a wall should be; a picture leans against another picture; an easel turns into a tree. The rooms are flat and clean, the colour laid down in blocks, nodding to Matisse and Magritte – designed spaces run on a dreamer’s logic. For Gardner, the studio is a set of nested rooms, each a step further from the world and a step closer to the daydream.

Imagined rather than visited, these landscapes have rivers cut through them to keep time moving. For Gardner, the desert is a place of solitude and introspection – an emptiness that unsettles and, for that very reason, makes room for something new.

For all the art-historical poise, something more tender moves underneath. The imagined nudes have begun to read as figures of fertility; the vase held by the woman in Painter in the Studio is an old emblem of it and, as the artist puts it, a container for whatever is turning over inside. The theme surfaces more obliquely elsewhere – in Painter, a figure moves away down a de Chirico arcade, two children in her arms, toward a dark doorway that suggests both a threat and a new chapter; nearby, a broken classical kouros, all youth and fractured masculinity, stands in for what is carried and what is passed on. Nothing is stated outright. What runs beneath these rooms – something like hope shadowed by unease – is held at a deliberate, painterly distance.

The self-portraits are fictions too. In Painter in the Studio, the likeness is loose, the studio not quite his own – furnished from memory with his parents’ oriental rug and the vintage guitars he collects, an easel set before a window in open homage to Magritte’s The Human Condition. These are autobiographical fragments arranged like a still life – a portrait of what the painter chooses to keep close.

Gardner lets the room tilt until everything settles onto a single decorative plane. What hangs on the walls is the room within the room – an interior of the mind, composed to the last inch. The studio, for Gardner, is less a place than a state of mind; the paintings, as he puts it, are “part memory, part imagination, and part art history.”