About the Artist
Triplex Horizon, 1998, Mixed media on plywood, 58x62in
"Paul Gardère was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, into a family of the elite class. He received most of his primary education there, and the rest in the United States. His father died when he was very young, so he grew up in a matriarchal family, which nurtured him and his brother personally and culturally. He received his training in art at The Cooper Union School of Art and at Hunter College. At Cooper Union, he formed close ties with modernist artists of great culture, such as the social-realist Robert Gwathmey and sculptor Reuben Kadish. At Hunter he studied with Robert Morris and John McCracken, but to Gardère they seemed to be very much a part of the art establishment, and he did not wholly relate to them. Of course, being in New York City was, in itself, and incredible visual experience; The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art were encyclopedias of visuality.
From the start, painting with its enormous traditions, both Western and non-Western, captured the imagination of Gardère. He has been wrestling within this contradictory context ever since. Gardère grew up in Haiti immersed in Western culture - people forget that part of the troubled and rich inheritance of the Caribbean is Western - but Haiti is not France, nor is it Europe. Africa is probably the larger component in the formation of the entity we call Haiti. But Haiti is not Africa either. Gardère received his adult education in the United States. He has elements in common with other immigrants, particularly those from the Caribbean basin. There are divergences as well as commonalities with African-American artists. With his biography and with these influences, Paul Gardère, the man, the artist, can function or fit in anywhere, but can he belong anywhere permanently? The late Meyer Shapiro, in several of his writings on Van Gogh, stressed that the essential idea of the modern is tied to the displacement, Diaspora, the erasure of borders/frontiers. A kind of perpetual exile, like James Joyce's. This exile can be internal as well as external. Paul Gardère can be identified within several existing cultural descriptions and artistic traditions, and yet, none of these could precisely represent and contain his diverse background. Born in the Caribbean, he is connected to Europe as well as to the Third World."
-Alejandro Anreus, Ph.D., Excerpt from “Paul Gardère, Recent Work”, Jersey City Museum Catalogue, 1999
From the start, painting with its enormous traditions, both Western and non-Western, captured the imagination of Gardère. He has been wrestling within this contradictory context ever since. Gardère grew up in Haiti immersed in Western culture - people forget that part of the troubled and rich inheritance of the Caribbean is Western - but Haiti is not France, nor is it Europe. Africa is probably the larger component in the formation of the entity we call Haiti. But Haiti is not Africa either. Gardère received his adult education in the United States. He has elements in common with other immigrants, particularly those from the Caribbean basin. There are divergences as well as commonalities with African-American artists. With his biography and with these influences, Paul Gardère, the man, the artist, can function or fit in anywhere, but can he belong anywhere permanently? The late Meyer Shapiro, in several of his writings on Van Gogh, stressed that the essential idea of the modern is tied to the displacement, Diaspora, the erasure of borders/frontiers. A kind of perpetual exile, like James Joyce's. This exile can be internal as well as external. Paul Gardère can be identified within several existing cultural descriptions and artistic traditions, and yet, none of these could precisely represent and contain his diverse background. Born in the Caribbean, he is connected to Europe as well as to the Third World."
-Alejandro Anreus, Ph.D., Excerpt from “Paul Gardère, Recent Work”, Jersey City Museum Catalogue, 1999
