Overview:
The Magenta Plains exhibition “Paul Gardère: Second Nature” revisited the Haitian artist’s sharp meditations on colonial power, identity, and spirituality. Through vivid, layered works, Gardère examined love, contradiction, and the unseen forces shaping Haiti’s story.
Paul Gardère never lived to see his work in Magenta Plains. But the paintings that were on view in October in “Paul Gardère: Second Nature”—created between 1994 and 2000— nevertheless established his presence at the Manhattan gallery. The works were shaped in the years following his 1993 residency at the Fondation Claude Monet in Giverny, France where he spent time in Monet’s picturesque garden.
In his evidently clairvoyant way, Gardère’s work, following his residency, covers the history of living between cultural worlds and imagines the future. His paintings create a unique intersection of his personal history, colonialism and traditional religions.
What emerged was a visual language that challenged colonial aesthetics and unearthed what lies beneath the surface of picturesque places and things, such as the garden he spent so much time in.
He is critical of such supposed perfection and highlights the unseen and the unsaid–the contradictions. Gardère died in 2011, yet his work continues to speak about history, identity, relationships and power.
Gardère’s “Second Nature” ran from Sept. 12 through Oct. 25 at Magenta Plains in Lower Manhattan. The result of bringing together key works following Gardère’s formative residency at the Fondation Claude Monet, was a refreshing and intentional collaboration between the gallery and the artist’s estate—one that gave space to Gardère’s layered explorations of colonial legacy, spiritual continuity and cultural hybridity.
The gallery took its time with Gardère’s work, a gesture rarely extended to Haitian artists. Instead of urgency to meet a political need or demand, they took a year to establish a relationship with his estate, learn about Haiti’s history and prepare the exhibit, positioning it during the peak of art season.
Gardère’s work at Magenta Plains was timely. As Olivia Smith, one third of the intergenerational founding team, noted, the gallery aims to “rediscover artists who are canonical.”
Gardère, a Brooklyn-based artist born in Haiti in 1944, developed a body of work that thoughtfully explored post-colonial history, cultural hybridity, race and identity—both within Haiti and across the broader diaspora.
Drawing from personal and national history, Gardère’s paintings merge classical European technique with Vodou cosmology, creating rich intersections between Caribbean and Western traditions. Clairvoyant in tone, they bridge past and future, colonial trauma and cultural possibility.
In merging realities—Napoleon as Toussaint L’Ouverture (and vice versa), altered royal courts and superimposed images of destruction—Gardère invites viewers to meditate on Haiti’s colonial past and its possible futures.
“The Legacy,” 2000. Courtesy of Magenta Plains.
The painting “The Legacy” is one of the few that did not stem from Gardère’s time in Giverny. It stands out for its direct engagement with colonialism and its cyclical nature. Its nuance and its ability to engage in aspects of the relationship between conquered and conqueror is striking.
It does several things at once, including addressing the implicit and explicit nature of power: Gardère references a majesty by depicting Napoleon in full regalia, yet disrupts that image by cutting off his head. Blood is in the air while small Black people are in the far left corner cleaning up the remnants of his destruction. Despite being dressed in his regalia, Napoleon’s impact remains clear. He is not fooling us.
Napoleon’s dual depiction as Toussaint L’Ouverture compels viewers to question L’Ouverture’s own similarities to the emperor. Was he complicit? Or, are there similarities that helped usher Haiti into its freedom?
Jonas Albro, Curator for Magenta Plains, explains that Gardère saw violence as an inevitable response to colonialism, a self-perpetuating cycle where conquest breeds resistance, which breeds further violence. “It’s both an indictment of that French colonial instinct, but also the wings on the sides are almost as if the painting is showing that it is lifting itself free of that colonial impulse,” Albro told the Haitian Times. The work suggests liberation emerging through, or alongside, the violence necessary to resist oppression.
Gardère’s art highlights the real and unseen, the traditional and untraditional, the role of sexuality in both exploitation and how the viewer is implicated based on their own interpretations of sex and coercion. Through it all, Gardère reminds viewers of Haiti’s multiplicity—and their role in confronting it.
While he wasn’t a practitioner of Vodou, his daughter, Catherine Gardère, who manages his estate, told The Haitian Times her father held deep respect for the faith: “To be a Haitian is to have this as part of your culture. He had the utmost respect and felt like this was a beautiful religion. There was not nearly enough respect paid within Haitian culture at large and certainly within global discourse of Vodou as a spiritual ecosystem.”
One of the most engaging qualities of his work is that everything represents multiple parts: glitter creates friction, references Vodou and serves as an aesthetic choice. During his lifetime, Gardère expressed feelings of marginalization. “Second Nature” presents him not just as an artist, but as a thinker as well as an artist. He imparts upon us the responsibility to be the same.
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