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11/5/2012

Carrie Moyer & Les Rogers

Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris

Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve is delighted to present a joint show of New York-based painters, Carrie Moyer who exhibits in Paris for the first time, and Les Rogers who has shown with the gallery since 2004.

For her first Parisian exhibition, Carrie Moyer continues her particular blend of hybridized biomorphic abstraction with expansive panache. In a series of works that make the painterʼs careful choreographies look effortless, Moyerʼs deft paint application dazzles in glossy licks and nacreous spills, pinned down with opaque stenciled forms that she lays down in ringing reds and graphic lamp blacks. Moyerʼs in-house painting jokes are nuanced to the point of discretion here, while her introduction of a graphite crayon line softened with water brings drawing into the work and eases her crisp graphic edges. Moyerʼs elegant use of paint is as pointed as her art historical homages are generous. She constructs her images through intellectual strata, quoting surfaces from Max Ernst, Colourfield, Constructivist, Situationist and Disco (!) as befits the form. In earlier works, Moyer cites concrete political events and figures through iconic symbols, but avoids the trap of dating the work through its specificity. In these new works, Moyer edges away from the political imagery she is known for and looks to bright ideas of Americana. Figural intimations remain though, with clues thrown up by her titles. Teasing suggestions of female genitalia, bones or Photoshop drop shadows hover through an aesthetic that favours the immediate graphic punch of street poster art. Moyer tests any pictorial legibility however, by embedding her references in asymptotic abstraction; in painterly stages of removal that leave the untouched raw canvas at the ʻbackʼ of the painting and work up to encrustations of surface glitter. Moyerʼs paintings are gripping and witty. Their visual clout hits the bullʼs-eye again and again.

While Moyerʼs canvases eschew any sense of border, leaving the eye to roam, Les Rogers hems in a new body of panel paintings with hand-carved frames. The frame references the Renaissance construct of a painted flat surface with edges, a ʻwindowʼ onto the world. But Rogers brings his viewer up short, pointing out the essentially fictive poetics of the art by rendering visible the apparatus of making. He does this through carving deliberately imperfect frame edges and the use of stains that highlight the grain, hence the presence, of the wood. Rogers quotes painterly styles from the photographic to the brut with a pluralistʼs free-for-all abandon. The range of mark-making and texture in these ʻsculptures of framed paintingsʼ is surprisingly intense; such layering up of contradictory paint applications constructs mesmerising spatial depth. But the insistent presence of the frame checks all of this and squeezes Rogerʼs boisterous gestural range up against itself. It also raises questions of assumed value and preciousness. Rogers has long exploited the illusionist qualities of oil paint with éclat, only to sabotage pictorial image with obliterating passages of abstract paint. His point is to undermine, to intentionally throw the work off kilter and to challenge ideas of beauty and predictability. He persistently shakes up his own practice and challenges the viewerʼs relationship to the work, continuing a pursuit of what he has called ʻbrokenʼ painting.
Kate McCrickard

Image: Les Rogers, March 11th, 2012, Huile et lasure sur bois / Oil, stain on wood 26 x 24 inches

Opening on Saturday 12th May 2012 from 6pm to 9pm

Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve
7, rue Pastourelle F-75003 Paris

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