Les Rogers at Leo Koenig

So, for the past week or so I've had a nasty cold, my second one of the season (not as severe as the case of the flu I had in October, which had me laid out for two weeks). After a week spent lying in bed drinking ginger ale and eating cough drops by the bag, I was ready to finally get back on my feet and into some galleries. I had an hour and a half to kill before meeting some friends in Flatiron, so I decided to check out what's new in Chelsea. I saw a couple shows that were worth mentioning, and over the next few days I'll get to writing about them, but first I'd like to talk about one show that particularly stood out in my mind.

Leo Koenig Inc. is a gallery on 23rd Street that I went to quite often when I worked for a framer on 11th Ave. I would go to Brownstein's (RIP) for lunch, since they were the closest restaurant to the frame shop, and spend the rest of my break eating picnic salad and going into the galleries on 23rd, Leo Koenig being one of them. Since that time, the gallery has expanded - there's the main space, and next door is Leo Koenig Projekte, a smaller space that follows the recent trend of galleries setting aside small spaces to experiment with new artists without devoting their entire gallery to them. The group show (curated by one of the gallery's artists) in the project space didn't do much for me, but Les Rogers's solo show in the main gallery exceeded my expectations.

Practically all of the paintings in the show were massive - the canvases wouldn't fit on any of the walls in my apartment... if they could even get up the stairs and in the door. The large "white cube" spaces in most galleries (including Leo Koenig) tend to shrink work, but Rogers's paintings stay massive. Each painting is a mix of representation and abstraction that takes a while to sort out visually and mentally. One painting in particular, "Tall Vanity," is particularly bewildering. Sure, a lot of detail is lost when looking at a five inch JPEG of an eight-foot-tall painting, but even up close in the gallery I had no idea what was going on.

That's what I like about the paintings in this show - they exist in the ambiguous space between representation and abstraction, motion and stillness, memory and fact. The palette itself is dark and mysterious (for the most part) with hints of vibrant color.

Looking back on things, I believe the reason I was so drawn to this show is its similarity to some of the Romanian Painters I've been looking at recently. His palette and color usage are similar to that of Adrian Ghenie, and the themes of memory, confusion, and amnesia remind me of Sergiu Toma's work. At the same time, though, Rogers is also tapping into American art history - his canvases are massive and the surfaces hint at the influence of DeKooning. The paintings definitely have passages of high abstraction, and the paintings' apparent grounding in "real" space makes these passages all the more mysterious. In a few of the paintings, there are jumbles of stuff that remind me of the debris left over from a disaster - a fire, a flood, or a nasty storm. Having lived through a few such events, I know the feeling of seeing a destroyed place and knowing that it will never again resemble the place in my memories.

UPDATE: To all Metal Gear fans: there's a clothing store on Broadway and 25th in Flatiron called "Big Boss Enterprises." The kicker: all the clothes are laid out on top of cardboard boxes in the center of the store. Was this intentional? I don't know, but it is awesome!