Introduction

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and trained as an artist after emigrating to the United States with his family in 1959, Paul Gardere's densely layered, mixed media paintings reflect the legacy of colonialism in Haiti and the contradictory contexts of Western and non-Western art.

Painting in acrylic in a detailed realist style, using media such as glitter, wood, photography and various other materials, Gardere employs appropriation, pastiche and collage, drawing critical attention to the iconography of historical western painting and indigenous traditions of Haitian art, particularly Vodou. Using images and the complexity of their cultural meaning as a pretext for understanding "exploitation, colonialism, dislocation and loss," Gardere attempts to work through the paradoxes of Haiti and that of his own diverse background.

Owing to the historic and frequently violent confluence of American, French and African cultures in Haiti, Gardere alludes in his work to hybridity, and to notions of cultural and physical crossing. For example, in Rowing to Giverny (1999), painted during his residency at Claude Monet's gardens in Giverny, France, Gardere depicts a Haitian child rowing to an ambiguous destination in a dingy. This image within a larger composition reads iconically, suggesting the escape of boat people attempting to cross over into a world that, although alien and unwelcoming, holds the promise of a brighter future. Coupled with the title of this piece, it reinforces the unbridgeable cultural distance between Haiti and France. Gardere also views the site of the gardens of Giverny as a kind of "selection, cultivation and condemnation of the unwanted." He has stated, "Benign as it may seem, it is an apt metaphor for nature as dominion. Today it does not take much to see Giverny as an . . . embrace of bourgeois comfort and its complicity in colonialism."

Addressing one of the signal events in Haiti's history, Gardere's The Legacy (2000) is based upon Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, commissioned in 1802 and completed in 1804. Toussaint L'Ouverture, the former slave and governor who liberated the Haitian people, was arrested in 1802 by Napoleonic forces who attempted to reinstate slavery on the island; L'Ouverture later died in the same year in captivity in France. Gardere rather directly appropriates the Ingres portrait, yet significantly alters it. Napoleon's hand characteristically tucked in his tunic is revealed as black. From a headless torso, streams of stylized red blood mimic the color of Napoleon's costume and reference the warrior god Ogun from Haitian folklore, evoking the long and tragic history of Haiti's bloodshed.

Paul Gardere acknowledges the work of modernist primitives in Haiti, Philome Obin (1892-1986) and Hector Hyppolite (1894-1948), among others. He holds degrees from the Cooper Union School of Art and Hunter College in New York, studying with Robert Gwathmey, Reuben Kadish and Robert Morris and John McCraken. Gardere has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painting and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, in addition to a Lila Acheson Wallace/Arts International Residency in Giverny, France, and artist residencies at Long Island University, Jamaica Art Center and the Studio Museum in Harlem.