Simon Garden’s paintings always intrigue and delight but just as you think you are getting to grips with his underlying ideas he shifts the ground imperceptibly captivating you, his audience, yet again. His work is the stuff of legend, of myth, of the unresolved narratives born out of the aural tradition of storytelling when people learned about the world through metaphor and parables. They suggest the unfinished sentence, the open-ended story, which allows the individual imagination to take possession of the tale and run with it in whatever direction, it pleases. There is an entrancing Magic Realist aspect to his work, which is joyful and funny and the delicious absurdity of the spotty dog in Square and the leaping dog in Through reveal Garden’s sense of humour. There is, however, a more serious side to his work, which addresses universal themes of isolation and the constant striving towards the unattainable. The sense of solitude, which is typical of a practising artist’s life, is partly biographical, but it also refers to the deep interior isolation of the human condition. Some things we have to do alone, the big moments in life; birth, death, suffering, joy are experienced differently by each individual. Others can empathise but can never really know how someone else is feeling inside the deep core of their being.

Garden does not represent individuals or paint portraits; his people are generic. Faces are hidden, hooded or indistinct. Solitary figures move within their own space. In Train Ride the oversized Alice in Wonderland figure seems trapped within the box of the moving carriage, but holds a balloon, an ephemeral and fragile object, which also signifies lightness, airiness and fun. The cast of characters include fishermen, gardeners and hermits with wings. When people occupy the same pictorial space they do not communicate, or even notice each other but they often commune with nature or display tenderness towards an animal; the woman leaning over a wall in Dog or the figure reaching out to the bird in Camouflage Coat.

Little clusters of houses, ordinary dwellings, with red roofs are separated from what could be identified as sacred places; mountain summits, tree-tops, buildings on stilts. The man on the ground in Ladder will find that if he does climb up, the entrance into the tree is not at the top. Navigating our way through life requires a delicate balance that is easily destroyed. The foundations of our lives are vulnerable like the house supported on thin sticks in Stilt House, set against its exquisitely freely painted landscape. However the sense of futility that used to be prevalent in Garden’s work has, in many paintings, been replaced by a sense of hope. In Bird the hand reaches up to the bird that has the freedom to fly away. The sadness is still there but the striving is no longer hopeless; there could be a happy ending. Pathways constantly lead the figures onwards, boats and trains suggest journeys, fingers point out routes and gaps between buildings offer alternate possibilities. The message seems to be, follow me if you dare and you will learn something; achieve something. Just as he takes risks in his own work to move forward to the next idea Garden tempts his figures and his audience to take that next step, to let their imaginations take them somewhere new. He identifies with that childlike ability to connect, in an innocent, magical way, with the world around him and yet his painting is far from naïve, it has a depth and complexity.

As a painter in the process of making a painting he too is on a journey, searching for formal solutions to compositional problems; achieving that exquisite balance of tone and colour that is so characteristic of his work. The insertion of an abstract shape here, a change of hue there, work in concert with the image so that the solution is many faceted and the final painting is both a sophisticated solution to a painterly problem and an arresting of a moment in time which gives it a narrative quality. It is possible to draw parallels with other artists who had similar concerns: Breughel, Chagall, Stanley Spencer or even Lowry but Garden has his own distinctive style which is instantly recognisable. He allows us to take tiny glimpses into his very private world but his essential core is always just out of reach. The wonky houses offer the promise of a warm welcome through brightly lit windows but there are no doors opening into the interior. There are as many layers of meaning as layers of paint and colour in his paintings and they consolidate into an enduring richness of experience. Like precious gems, which continually respond to changing light these paintings respond to the mood of the viewer, offering a fluctuating perception of life and an infinity of possible narratives. Ultimately Simon Garden’s supreme ability as a painter allows him to combine all these disparate elements into a satisfying whole, creating a vision which is singular and unique.