The SCAD Museum of Art presents “Guest Room,” the first museum exhibition in the U.S. by artist Alex Gardner. In recent years, Gardner has gained widespread attention for his bold painting style. This exhibition presents a selection of Gardner’s most recent work, along with new pieces commissioned for SCAD deFINE ART.

Combining a distilled aesthetic sense, a potent narrative capacity and an assortment of emotional landscapes, Gardner’s paintings present eloquent compositions that speak beyond their two-dimensional condition. His style has been often associated with Mannerism, a 16th-century, post-High Renaissance art movement that privileged gesture over representation, and indulged a particular stylization of figure over the technical obsession of the great masters of High Renaissance. In that sense, Gardner has developed a vocabulary of elements including color tones, seemingly architectural spaces, vegetation and a series of genderless, featureless dark figures. Together, these elements are in continuous movement, affecting each other and ultimately creating cryptic narratives — which perhaps say more about who is reading them and how. Inasmuch as Gardner’s work is in clear dialogue with the history of human representation in art, it is also connotative of current conflicts about race, gender, desire and the technological mediation of the body. In addition, the titles of Gardner’s works suggest familiar places, or what appear to be character identities, boosting the hazy environment and creating new layers of questions in the already ciphered scenes.

For “Guest Room,” Gardner has thought about the specificity of Gallery 109 at the SCAD Museum of Art and the way one navigates the space. With this in mind, each of the canvases becomes a portal or, in Gardner’s words, a “hotel room you are opening, a vignette of an interpersonal interaction, a private moment you are glimpsing.” His acknowledgment of the spectator is a critical point of the show. It opens questions about the negotiation between the strange and the familiar, and about the shared feelings within intimacy and hosting. It also suggests an interesting relationship, even an interchangeability, between figure and space. The spaces Gardner creates are close to what French philosopher Michel Foucault described as “heterotopias,” or places that are elsewhere and that can represent several incompatible sites and times at once. For Foucault, these slices of time break traditional notions of space and time. That is precisely what Gardner’s paintings allow: intimate gestures of communication and proximity, frozen in front of us, in an undetermined space.

“Guest Room” offers a generous introduction to Gardner’s lexicon, and an opportunity for the audience to encounter a unique, expressive painting style. In a time where we are constantly reminded about our differences, Gardner’s ability to construct narratives outside the constricting limits of identity inspires broader forms of perception of what is otherwise rigid and unmovable.

“Guest Room” is curated by Humberto Moro, SCAD curator of exhibitions.