Brett Cody Rogers

Rogers' paintings are constructed with stylized marks and aggressive colour combinations that assemble the image while simultaneously fragmenting the identity of the subject. This volatility created through the play on the unstable nature of perception is re-enforced by the paintings transitions between the natural and the synthetic. Radioactive colours collide with organic tones, just as gesture and image co-exist on the canvas.

The mirrors that Rogers paints resist reflection, returning an arrangement of paint marks. They refuse to reveal the space surrounding them and instead refer back to the painted surface. While the smaller, more intimately sized self-portraits bring the work into the realm of the personal and self-reflective, they propose a shifting identity that is only as specific as the contour of the head. Taken in the context of fragmented mirrors, emptily constructed landscapes of rocks, trees and streetlamps emitting artificial fluorescent light, they survey the illusionary character of perception of things both natural and fabricated.

Rogers' scrapes and dry-brush smears are fixed in the modernist painting tradition and work as architectural rendering and representation of the object, but also as an atmospheric device. The viewer is distanced from the concrete surface through the transparent layers of paint that allow for suggestions of depth and immateriality. The paintings become phantasms of common subjects, as references to architecture, nature and the everyday are represented as abstract events.

Brett Cody Rogers lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include: 'Split', The Approach, London, 2005 and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, 2005.

Pressetext

Brett Cody Rogers
That Void/What Void