Born 1966 I Lives and works in New York, USA
For three decades, Les Rogers (b. 1966) has explored the impact of new technologies and media-saturation on visual culture, creating vibrant paintings that move promiscuously between figuration and abstraction. The artist, who is based in the New York-area, irreverently engages painting’s histories, abutting and admixing recognizable allusions to various images or traditions. Working in oil on canvas, he often paints quotationally, citing works by such artists as Ingres, Courbet, Picasso, and Baselitz. Though he frequently works from a photographic source, he doesn’t reproduce images faithfully. Rather, he recontextualizes his source images with forms borrowed from yet other paintings, or with spontaneous gestural marks. Rogers works associatively, incorporating forms inspired by quotidian objects or scenes he himself has witnessed. He paints intuitively and spontaneously at first, and then edits deliberately. “In the beginning everything is moving and chaotic, then I tame it, weigh it down. It’s anchored but still moving,” he explains. “If everything is too much in what seems to be its proper place, I have to go back and throw it off balance…I believe in broken paintings.” The resulting canvases offer a pictorial space characterized by fracture and disjuncture, featuring elements that slip between form and formlessness.
Across Rogers’s oeuvre, one sees a vast sampling of styles and references; the overall effect reflects the constant barrage of images we are regularly subjected to in contemporary culture. There are moments of overwhelming chaos, and passages of surprising clarity. In the paintings he has completed since 2019, Rogers has expanded his material exploration—creating shaped paintings hewn from resin, fiberglass, foam, and aluminum—while distilling his formal lexicon to biomorphic elements that suggest, at once, microbes and spectacular landscapes.
