Paul Gardere: Multiple Narratives

Press Release

Multiple Narratives

Paul Gardère

March 6th – April 12th, 2008

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present “Multiple Narratives”, an exhibition of recent works, mixed media on paper, by Paul Gardère . This will be his first solo show at the gallery. The reception is Thursday, March 6th, 6-8pm, and the artist will be present.

Paul Gardère’s work in its formal complexity reflects the artist’s mixed ancestry, his attachment to his Haitian origins as well as a mind open to the subtleties of today’s art environment. His artistic means range the gamut of Western art history, including Caribbean and local American culture.
The theme “Multiple Narratives”, refers to the confluence of these diverse sources. The work is resolutely committed to figuration although there are no specific story lines here. It is the simultaneous presentation of many iconic sources that eventually create powerfully expressive perspectives at once biographical, social and historical. Gardère’s considerable knowledge of art history and its context, as well as his impressive technical control allow him to stand at a point where cultures overlap and new meanings are generated.

Paul Gardère’s life long investigation of the arts of painting, drawing and printmaking comes once again to fruition here in his quest for a visual language that would express the dichotomy of his own history. Appropriation, pastiches and imagery of his own are inextricably mixed in these surprisingly lucid works. It is as if the creative act becomes an instrument in the realization of a larger self. Even the rigid convention of the frame is pressed into service, providing an extension of context sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic, for the story unfolding inside.

The works in the main body of the show are based on enlargements of portrait studies that the French artist, Jean Dominique Ingres did of his sitters from early to mid 1800s. Without detracting from Ingres’ mastery, Gardère attempts to elicit part of the larger context of these elegant images. It was not lost on Gardère that the period coincides with the emergence in Haiti and other French colonies of a Francophile bourgeoisie that adopted European manners and education as a model in spite of the distress and chaos around it. Even in the case of Haiti, independent since 1804, a colonization of the mind continued, visible in the manner of dress, affectation of language, and the general conduct of polite society.

Included in this exhibition is a large format work, “The American Cousins”, based on a drawing of the Forrestier family by Ingres from 1850. In this work, ironic homage is paid to the heritage of mixed identity and the conflicts and suffering latent in it. The artist does not forget that the years following the French Revolution were the formative years of the modern Era, an ambiguous term when applied to deprived nations. Paul Gardère looks to the underbelly of modernity to bring out intense emotive qualities both in line and in painted surfaces. The images resonate with individual distinction as well as social commentary.

Paul Gardère was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where he was raised and educated in the midst of the bourgeoisie. He came to New York at the age of fourteen. He sought art education as a teenager at the Art Students League, later obtaining a B.A at Cooper Union and an MFA at Hunter College. He has exhibited both in the U.S and in his homeland. His work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research, Jersey City Museum, Gidde Museum, Davenport, Iowa, Musée S. Pierre, Port-au-Prince, and in libraries of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Brooklyn Museum, Beinecke Library at Yale University and the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.