Despite the encouraging title of the show that recently opened at Waterfall Arts in Belfast – “Harold Garde: You Are Not Alone” – the paintings themselves can initially feel confrontational and unsettling. They are imposing, some 6 and 7 feet across, and they hang unframed in a relatively compact gallery, so that their presence is inescapable and intense. They are raw, with large areas of exposed, unpainted gesso. They are boldly and unapologetically colorful; orange, purple, turquoise and crimson ignite their surfaces. Eyes and mouths are akimbo, almost never corresponding neatly to the outline of one face or the other but, rather, floating somewhere in the overlapping spaces between them.

A handout at the reception desk quotes Garde: “These new paintings are intentionally unfinished, requiring the viewer to complete.” I propose an alternate and ultimately more liberating view. Do we really need to “complete” the paintings at all? The question arises because it’s clear to this reviewer that any initial discomfort originates precisely in our mind’s need to explain things. Human beings cling to tidy logic. It’s easier to accept paintings as figurative or abstract; one or the other, but not both. Our brain is often uneasy when asked to deal with ambiguity.

By letting go of rational thinking, however, and approaching these works with no preconceptions, wonderous things can happen and the meaning of the exhibition’s title reveals itself more fully and transcendently. “We live in a time of grave uncertainty and social unrest,” the show materials state. Indeed, Garde taps into our contemporary anxieties. Right inside the corridor beyond the threshold, we are greeted by two distinct faces and a less defined one partly ghosted behind the left visage. All are unsmiling. The left face has blue around one eye and a wash of yellow spilling from it that implies a flood of tears. Blue also obliterates the whites of the other eye, seemingly infecting it and making it sore. All their expressions, and most throughout the exhibition, look sad or scared. They implore us to please do something about our state of affairs.

Garde’s earliest influences – nominally abstract artists Ilya Bolotowsky, George McNeil and Leon Kelly – toggled, to different degrees, between pure abstraction and figural elements. Bolotowsky was arguably the most resolutely abstract, but the suggestion of figures still pushes through in some of his work. Garde’s style is a kind of synthesis of all these. After his early work, faces and figures were consistently present. But he seized passionately on the importance abstraction placed on spontaneous gesture, physical engagement with the canvas and the materiality of paint.

For most of his career, the surfaces of Garde’s paintings were thick with troweled-on paint, every inch dense with color. Thick black lines often articulated order and rhythm within the picture plane. Faces and figures dominated or receded amid the abstract elements. In the current works, these qualities have transformed due, in large part, to the diminished capacities of an aging body (Garde, who splits his time between Belfast and New Smyrna Beach, Florida, is 97). Spontaneous gesture remains, but it is lighter and quicker, limited to the time he is able to stand, and also by the reduced scope of his reach. Pigments are no longer thickly impastoed. Instead, the paints are often washes that refuse the orderly confinement of their brushstroke by dripping and bleeding into other colors. All of this speaks poignantly to our transient existence on this planet and asks that we accept the messiness of life as it is – drips, smudges and unfinished areas of canvas (and ourselves). In fact, these works seem to say, there is beauty in our vulnerabilities and imperfections.

The inability to clearly distinguish one countenance from another challenges our sense of otherness, something our currently divisive world condition would have us believe is our natural state. Garde’s paintings seem to argue a central tenet of all mystical religious and spiritual paths: that we are one. We may be different from each other, but we are not separate from one another. Save for their self-awareness, the images feel practically childlike. But it’s an innocence that is profound and moving. If we can only immerse ourselves in that profundity by abandoning our propensity for rationalization, we will dive into realms of more boundless perception and, ultimately, experience that oneness.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland.

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