At Monte Clark Gallery until July 13

There’s nothing immediately intimidating about Tim Gardner’s watercolours and pastels—except perhaps their technique. Gardner renders his photo-realist scenes of friends, family, and “the great outdoors” with astonishing technical facility. His accomplishment is especially impressive when he is working in watercolour, which is difficult to control and almost impossible to erase or to gracefully overpaint. It’s a medium more suitable to lyrical semi-abstraction than to the painstaking realism that has earned this Vancouver Island artist international acclaim and solo exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, and London.

Still, Gardner’s success is not due solely to his ability to manipulate his chosen media. His work, which often appears to be based on snapshots, queries representational conventions, social relations, and the aesthetics of vernacular photography. At the same time, it investigates tropes of masculinity, including brotherly love, team sports, and outdoor activities such as hiking and skiing. His male figures are often depicted in romantic landscapes, calling up art-historical conventions while also questioning our contemporary relationship to the natural world.

Two compositional devices prevail in Gardner’s new show at the Monte Clark Gallery. The first, as seen in most of the small watercolours here (and in his earlier work), presents a small, central figure, his back to the viewer, gazing out at a natural panorama of, say, snow-draped mountains or moonlight glimmering on a dark sea. An example is Great Divide, in which a distant hiker pauses on a rocky outcropping and looks at the mountainous vista beyond. This image neatly re-articulates 19th-century ideas of the Romantic sublime, in which tiny humanity is awed and overwhelmed by the power and immensity of nature.

As Christopher Riopelle wrote in the 2007 catalogue for Gardner’s National Gallery show in Britain, references to Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist—one of the most influential of German Romantic paintings—may be found here. Riopelle also notes, as we do, that because the figure’s back is turned to us, we can’t read his expression. Instead, we project our own feelings—grand or trivial—onto him.

Gardner’s second recurring device, rendered here in oil pastels on large sheets of paper, reverses the proportions, focusing on a close foreground figure, depicted from the waist up and posed in front of heavily forested mountains. Here, it is the person who is monumentalized rather than the natural world, again calling up art-historical conventions that convey a sense of ownership or domain.

Roy With Red Cup and Brian, Larry Bird Shirt are both portraits of tree planters, dressed in characteristic layers of casual clothing and smiling or squinting in the bright sunlight. Although both stand facing us, neither looks directly at us, oddly destabilizing the power dynamic. That these amiable-looking guys are tree planters, backgrounded by virgin forests rather than clear-cuts, sets up other tensions. In an understated way, Gardner folds consideration of our “natural resources” into their exploitation and then puts a human face on our attempts to rectify the mess we’ve made—and keep on making.