In a fortuitous coincidence, I arrived at Paul Gardère: Vantage Points just as the artist’s daughter was walking another visitor through the show. Catherine Gardère, who manages her late father’s estate, generously invited me to join. Just two days earlier, I was unfamiliar with both Paul Gardère and the Stuyvesant-Fish House, the historic home, now owned by Cooper Union, hosting the show; the artist’s work caught my eye online. Seeing his vibrant multimedia pieces with his daughter among the trappings of a home felt like a most fitting introduction.
Gardère, a Cooper Union alumnus, was born in Haiti in 1944 and moved to New York with his mother and brother as a teenager. His works deftly combine iconography and symbolism from multiple cultures. The resulting tension is not just between influences from Haiti and United States, but also between Gardère’s Catholic, Francophone background in Haiti (threatened by autocrat François Duvalier’s bloody regime, prompting the Gardère family to leave the country) in contrast with Haitian traditions and art separate from French colonization. “Triplex Horizon” (1998), a commanding mixed-media work flanked by two semi-abstract blue paintings (the show’s two earliest pieces), holds these cultural elements in an uneasy balance: A reproduction of “Shipwreck” (1965) by Haitian artist Rigaud Benoit is torn into multiple pieces and paired with a small recreation of a Monet painting, along with photographs of the US coastline. The dominant colors — red and glittery blue — reflect the flags of Haiti, France, and the United States, yet each country’s imagery is isolated from the others, and Haiti’s is literally ripped apart.
What makes Vantage Points so distinctive, and poignant, is Gardère’s personal touch. His departure from both the classical, European-influenced Haitian painting that he took up after graduate school and the American Modernism of professors including Robert Morris and John McCracken led him toward a mixed-media and, at times, maximalist aesthetic. But nothing in the show is visually overwhelming. Instead, his techniques and materials merge with his subject matter to sketch out a portrait of his life; even when Gardère is commenting on topics as weighty as colonialism and racism, the sense of an individual in the studio, with a singular history and a daily routine, lingers. In “Rowing to Giverny” (1999) and “Le Pont” (1995), views of Monet’s famous garden in Giverny, France, are inspired by the artist’s 1993 residency at the Fondation Claude Monet, but the landscapes are not pure Monet — a bit of Haiti is mixed in. The shimmering mud surrounding the painting in “Le Pont” makes this work — which hung for decades in Gardère’s studio — about the realities and textures of place, nature as a life-sustaining entity, not an object to be tamed in the name of art.
In this way, Gardère’s life is contained in each of his works. And through them, he invites his audience into a meaningful and personable dialogue, just as his daughter did in sharing the stories of her father’s art.
Paul Gardère: Vantage Points continues at the Stuyvesant-Fish House (21 Stuyvesant Street, East Village, Manhattan) through June 6. The exhibition was presented courtesy of the Estate of Paul Gardère with coordination by Cooper Union School of Art Dean Adriana Farmiga and Assistant Dean Yuri Masny.
