A few weeks ago I found myself at the opening of Alex Gardner’s new how, Animals, at Perrotin, feeling that there was something disarming about the works and the title. The word lands with a blunt, even barbaric force, a reminder that beneath the social contracts and the curated surfaces of modern life, we remain creatures of instinct, driven by needs we can barely name. Gardner is not being unkind. He is being honest. The title is a reckoning: with our shared rawness, our collective inability to fully transcend the thing we are. But done in these deep blues, and the abstracted figures give you a sense of calm as well, an almost unnerving calm and chaos.
And so the paintings themselves seem to answer that reckoning with something close to grace. Gardner's faceless figures drift through fields of bruised blue and deep green, folding into one another in states of embrace, suspension, and quiet connection. Since becoming a father, his work has shifted — children now appear as symbols of hope rather than anxiety, and the existential dread that once animated his practice has softened into something more like acceptance. There is a something closer to looking at the future with stubborn and protective lenses on. These are not paintings about what humans are at their worst. They are paintings about what we reach for, again and again, despite it.
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