Jonathan Gardner: The Studio

MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to present The Studio, a solo exhibition by Jonathan Gardner, the American painter whose stylised, dreamlike interiors turn the oldest subjects in art – the nude, the still life, the landscape – into invented scenes, at once intimate and archetypal. For his exhibition at the gallery’s London space, Gardner takes the artist’s studio as his subject: rooms within rooms, paintings within paintings, built in equal parts from memory, imagination and art history.

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.