Les Rogers “Just Married”

Elga Wimmer PCC, in association with curcioprojects, present Les Rogers’ solo exhibition of recent paintings entitled Just Married. This will be Rogers’ first solo exhibition with the gallery; he previously exhibited in the gallery’s summer group show A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

When Rogers began his new paintings on mass produced wood doors (referencing De Kooning’s use of doors for his Women series, 1964/65) this past summer, he saw them as singles, without the intention of bringing them together as a diptych. Then in early fall when he placed the singles together as two, he recognized a connection between them as “couples”- either by being argumentative or by finding common ground they helped define and reveal each other. Recently some of the paintings remain “single”, but for many of the new “couples” they are “just married”.

Bob Nickas, critic and curator, wrote of Rogers’ approach to painting – “Rogers has a tendency to de-stabilize pictorial space. This intentional undermining of a picture gives it a tension and, at the same time, a (dis) equilibrium it would not otherwise have had. His intuitive, spontaneous approach is followed by a slower, deliberate activity – adding, subtracting, canceling out.” While Rogers continues to de-stabilize and undermine his paintings through his layers upon layers of veils of watery colorful depth asserting themselves against concentrated solid formations, drips, daps, and splashes, he creates an immediacy found in Abstract Expressionism and a fluidity of action with a definitive brushstroke. These direct and palpably “just made” panels are then brought together to create something altogether new—capturing a moment —the start of a new life together.

Les Rogers lives and works in New Jersey and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989 with a BFA. Rogers will have a solo exhibit at Mier Gallery in Los Angeles next year and has had among others solo exhibitions at Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris; Leo Koenig Inc, Half Gallery, NYC; The Happy Lion, LA; Galerie Christina Wilson, Copenhagen; Galerie Michael Janssen, Cologne., Karlheinz Meyer, Karlsruhe.His work is in important private collections as Jerry Speyer, the Hall Art Foundation as well as Susan and Michael Hort Collection in New York, Elton John, UK, and among others in corporate collections as Bosch—Berlin and Prince Tabacco- Copenhagen.