2010
Softback, 36 pages
Publisher: Belgrave Gallery
Dimensions: 170 x 220 mm
Exhibition catalogue produced in 2010 on the occasion of the exhibition Atlantic Edge from St Agnes to the Lizard at Belgrave Gallery, 22 Fore Street, St Ives, Cornwall TR26 1HE
10 – 31 July 2010
I’ve said that Gardiner’s latest work is shaped by the history of art, but I should maybe have said by the history of representation, or even of seeing. Picture postcards, too, are embedded in the way we see – that an artist sees – the landscape of Cornwall. That is quite a different thing from saying that Gardiner, with his postcardy titles, is trying to paint postcards, or even Tunnards or Nicholsons. Being a painter of histories is not the same thing as being an historicist painter. The palette of Gardiner’s Lighthouse, The Lizard (cat 20) has something of the over-heightened contrasts of commercial imagery, and even some of its visual prompts. And yet the work’s juggling of colour is also intensely painterly and intently modern, neo-expressionist rather than romantic.
Charles Darwent
