Colors will do what shapes can not - Dr. Dror Pimental about Amos Roger work
Author
Dr. Dror Pimental
Senior lecturer
Bezalel Academy of Art and Design
Colors will do what shapes can not
Observing the works of Amos
Roger, one cannot help but notice their exploding vitality, and the celebration
of life they present. This is evident first and foremost in the use of color:
the pieces are flooded with strong colors, unapologetic of their suggestive power,
announcing their presence loudly and clearly. This is not a monochromatic – and
therefore subtle – color scheme. To the contrary, it is the blunt chromaticism
of primary colors – red, blue, yellow and green – laid side by side and on top
of one another on the wooden panels which serve as a canvas, creating together
a festival of color reminiscent of Matisse's pieces.
The works are not only a celebration of color but of shape as well. Here
too, the artist uses primal and natural forms. This means an abundance of oval
shapes, concave or convex, circles, ellipses, and spirals. These entwine
through the pieces and create a living space for the colors of which they are
made, even as they are contrasted almost to the point of suggesting a struggle.
This serpentine formal attitude is present in the objects populating the piece
as well as in the pieces' backgrounds. Sometimes it leaks from the object to
the background and sometimes the other way around, until reaching a state where
the divisions dissolve: the object is swallowed in the background and the
background takes over the object. Moreover, in some pieces it is not clear
whether an object remains at all. The object is in fact wiped-out, leaving room
for a colorful weave of forms saturating the painted surface to its edges. In
this way Roger creates painted surfaces which are flat and devoid of any
aspiration to describe perspective, characterized by formal repetition which
constitutes visual testimony to the artist's restless motoric activity.
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The material itself is also part of the celebration: Roger eschews the
use of the cold and alienated materials of the current age, like buildings,
pieces of furniture, appliances and so on. Instead he prefers to use natural
matter, living matter, and this is reflected mainly in his use of wood as a
substrate for his pieces. It is likely that the wood panels on which Roger
creates his celebration of color and form are taken from his immediate
environment. Such pieces are often thrown away as useless trash after the valuable
goods packed in them have been removed. Roger seizes these panels as if they
were prized possessions, turning the waste of a consumerist culture to a
goldmine of art.
His technique also remains close to the natural and primal. In this
exhibition, Roger chose not to make use of the new techniques opened to art in
the current era, like computer processing. Some pieces are painted by hand, and
in others, like Pollock, he sprays paint in wide gestures directly over the
surface. In some pieces he makes use of a traditional carving technique,
leaving a trace of the singular vitality of the artist's body on the piece.
Roger goes only half the way with his carving, however. Because the surface he
toils to carve does not then serve as the basis for repeated printing of
woodcuts. Instead, he paints the carved surface itself, thus making it – and
not the prints that are supposed to be birthed from it – the location where his
art takes shape.
The thematic content developed in the pieces remains close to the primal
and primordial. Roger abandons the urban and artificial world behind, clearing
the space for images taken from the world of animals and plants, especially
flowers and fish. Flowers appear in two main forms: the solo appearance of a
flower overwhelming the frame with its sharp colors, and the group appearance
of several flowers bound together in a vase. Roger here draws from the
years-long tradition of using the image of a flower in art. As it was used by
painters such as Van Gogh, Warhol or O'Keefe, Roger sees flowers as symbols of
vitality and life, and in his case also an implied eroticism oscillating
between the male and the female sexes.
The image of a fish is also strongly represented. Roger's fish is a kind
of primeval fish, at least in two
aspects: first, the drawing of the fish itself is sloppy and deliberately made
as an afterthought. Roger takes the primal, simple form of a fish, one that can
be drawn by any child, and imports this into his surfaces while imbuing it with
a certain aura of hollow opacity, especially evident in its eyes. Second, the
fish with ornamental fins which populate aquariums in homes do not interest
him. He is interested in the fish as an archaic form, the fish that is at the
lowest level of evolutionary development and hidden in the dark abysses of the
ocean. In some of the pieces the fish even blows up to the mythical dimensions
of leviathan – the father of all fishes – threatening to flow outside the frame
with its ungainly, fatty shape. In
other pieces there is an interesting crossover from the image of a fish to that
of a bird. Thus, in one of the pieces the leviathan-fishes appear hovering over
an orb, which could be interpreted as Planet Earth. In another piece two blue
fishes are seen on the ground, out of water. Roger may be hinting here at the
linkage between birds and fishes, since from an evolutionary perspective, birds
evolved from fishes.
The human figure, while not central to the pieces, is still present in
one form or another. This can be seen in a piece where the main star is a vase
of flowers, but its edges are decorated with the figures of Greek warriors. The
human figure becomes alienated in Roger's hands: human forms are deliberately
distorted, whether by distorting their shapes or by making them as narrow as
anorexics. This alienation enables them to be absorbed by the general
thematicism, dealing with plants and animals. Thus, for example, in a portrait
of two women, carved on a black background in the same serpentine line
characterizing the flower paintings; or in another piece echoing the clumsy
portraits of Baselitz, where two figures seem to merge in a gesture of a kiss:
those who look closely will see that each of the figures is populated by
miniature images that occupy the space between the piscine and the avian. Man,
one might say, does not control nature but seems to meld with it into one
entity.
All of these, the color and the form, the technique and thematicism –
lead Roger to a critical position against the hyper-capitalist existence of our
time, where the world in which we live is undergoing increasing automation and
virtualization, leading to estrangement from the primal and the natural. This
critical position is seen most strongly in the piece of sculpture called
"Silence," made from leftovers of consumerist culture wrapped in iron
netting sculpted to the shape of a fish. It seems like everything that was left
out of the painted pieces now appears in the body of the statue: all the
materials alien to Roger's world – tin, cardboard, plastic etc. – are enveloped
in the stomach of the leviathan-fish, and the latter becomes a sort of landfill
or place where these materials can be left and forgotten. In this manner Roger
creates the opposite of the abject: it is not identified with the natural materials
from which life is made, as asserts French theoretician Julia Kristeva, but
rather with the artificial materials that have no affinity with nature, and are
therefore also lifeless.
One can conclude, therefore, that it is not only pure aesthetics and
visual poetry that occupy Roger's mind. From the celebration of colors and
shapes populating his pieces one can elicit
also his concern for the world in which we live. This is true especially
in the face of the unending threat to the world from companies and corporations
that see only the revenue bottom line, and while doing so turning their backs
on what is most precious to us.
New Exhibition - Variety of species - Amos Roger
The Man and the Living Museum, Ramat
Gan National Park
A festive opening on Thursday 14.09 at
19:00
Sponsored by Mr. Singer, Mayor of
Ramat Gan
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