Devon DeJardin: To The Garden We Return: One Night Only
LOS ANGELES CA | albertz benda is proud to present To The Garden We Return a one night only event from Los Angeles based artist Devon DeJardin, featuring five large floral works accompanied by a series of intimate small scale paintings and water colors.
In To The Garden We Return, Devon DeJardin presents a new body of work that reflects on a timeless human longing—the desire to return to an original state of wholeness. Rooted loosely in the biblical Garden of Eden, the exhibition expands beyond any singular tradition, drawing from a shared, cross-cultural mythology of paradise lost and the enduring hope of restoration.
Across civilizations, there exists a recurring vision of a beginning untouched by conflict—before war, before division, before the weight of self-consciousness. In today’s world, where images of unrest, fragmentation, and instability circulate with relentless speed, that vision feels both distant and urgently necessary. To The Garden We Return emerges as a quiet counterpoint: not as an escape, but as a remembering.
The paintings center on DeJardin’s guardian figures—abstracted, watchful forms that exist somewhere between the human and the symbolic. Surrounded by lush gardens, flowering structures, and organic geometries, these figures embody a state of protection, stillness, and internal equilibrium. They are not simply protectors of a place, but of a condition—one of harmony, innocence, and spiritual clarity.
The gardens themselves become more than landscape. They function as psychological and emotional spaces, where nature and structure coexist in balance. Layers of color and form evoke both growth and fragility, suggesting that this state of perfection is not lost entirely, but obscured—something that can be revisited, if only momentarily, through reflection and awareness.
Rather than offering a fixed narrative, To The Garden We Return invites the viewer into a shared contemplation: What does it mean to return? Is it a physical place, a spiritual state, or a shift in perception? And in a time defined by acceleration and disconnection, is the act of remembering itself a form of resistance?
DeJardin’s work does not attempt to resolve these questions. Instead, it holds space for them—creating a visual language that is at once ancient and immediate, personal and universal. The guardians remain present, steady, and enduring, suggesting that even amidst collapse or chaos, there exists something within us that is unchanged.
A memory. A blueprint. A garden.
