Establishing Ground: Otto Rogers’ Modernist Vision

OTTO DONALD ROGERS Establishing Ground: Otto Rogers’ Modernist Vision

This brochure accompanies Establishing Ground: Otto Rogers’ Modernist Vision, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work at Oeno Gallery from April 30- May 24, 2022.

Essay: Jessica Veevers Exhibition Curators: Carlyn Moulton and John Peter McDonald Photographs: Zachary Shunock and Matthias Flynn Design: Rosalie Maheux All Rights Reserved: Oeno Gallery, Inc. ISBN: 978-0-9952561-3-2 Cover image: Untitled Wall Relief, Acrylic on panel, 30 x 29.5 inches.

Artist photo credit: Christopher Lyons

Oeno Gallery 2274 County Road 1 Bloomfield, Prince Edward County Ontario K0K1G0 613-393-2216 oenogallery.com

OTTO DONALD ROGERS Establishing Ground: Otto Rogers’ Modernist Vision

with text by

Jessica Veevers, PHD

Oeno Gallery Prince Edward County, Ontario, 2022

Introduction

It has been a great honour to know Otto Rogers – as an artist, mentor, neighbour and friend. We met in 2004 and have collaborated on many exhibitions of his work. He was an extraordinary creative force, producing new work until just weeks before his passing in April of 2019.

This exhibition features works that were completed in his last years, not previously exhibited. Together, they give us the opportunity to consider Otto’s contemplative journey toward the end of a long and influential career.

At the opening of our last exhibition of his paintings, my teenage son – long an admirer of Otto’s paintings – came up to me and whispered that he didn’t like the new show, finding the works too dark.

At just that moment, Otto came up behind him, threw his arm around his shoulders, and asked what he thought. For a brief moment, I feared what he might blurt, but then he said something quite insightful.

“Mister Rogers,” he said, “I do not think I am old enough to understand them.” And he was quite right.

These are works by an artist unafraid to contemplate life’s complexities through a mature lens, with a spare palette that keeps only the elements necessary for perspective. There are many dark passages which may remind us of sculptural forms and voids, or perhaps rich loamy soil created by years and decades of growth and decay, seasons passing, distillation. So many experiences accumulate in a life richly lived. Still, memory works its sleight of hand, allowing us to retain glimpses of some past moments, but blocking our access to so many others, even those that may have shaped us in significant ways. It takes a certain maturity to let go the impulse to solve life’s mysteries, to take comfort and solace in the unknown.

It is the particular genius of the artist to be able to teach us valuable lessons, even long after they are gone.

Carlyn Moulton Curator, Oeno Gallery April 2022

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OTTO ROGERS

Establishing Ground: Otto Rogers’ Modernist Vision Jessica Veevers, PhD

Jessica Veevers is a Calgary-based writer, curator, art historian, and sessional professor with Mount Royal University.

As the former Director of Oeno Gallery, she curated a number of solo and group exhibitions. Supported by an FRQSC research fellowship, Veevers completed a PhD in Art History at Concordia University, where she concurrently taught courses on the theory of art conservation and the development of Canadian abstract art. Her dissertation research was awarded the Michel de la Chenelière Art and Culture Award through the MBAM and examined the materiality and methodology of art making and its relationship with reception, historiography, and collection practices in Canada.

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What is painting and what is low-relief sculpture? This is one of the questions that Otto Donald Rogers explored with his work and a prescient one when we look at the texture, layering, and mixed-media quality of the body of work in this posthumous exhibition at Oeno Gallery, May 2022, three years after Rogers’ death. Rogers was not preoccupied with the formalist extremes of high modernist art trends, such as purifying painting from sculpture, achieving ultimate flatness with his painting, or driving towards the teleological end-game favoured by some modernist practitioners and theorists. However, in his ability to balance tradition – without being stifled or mannerist–and the avant-garde –without being enslaved to the new and novel – Rogers was quintessentially modernist.

He was one of the earliest adopters of acrylic paint. He picked it up in 1957 in Madison, Wisconsin. It had just been invented in 1955.2 Rogers explained, It was a modernist medium; a lot of modern painting would not have been achieved without acrylic paint. Acrylic allows experimentation in a different way. It has less history. When there is too much history there is the risk of being bound by it. Tradition is important, but if you are a slave to it, you will kill innovation. 3

Rogers had become fascinated with layers because of his earlier training in printmaking; he 4 liked that with acrylic paint he could add many layers in one sitting. He was drawn to the milky flat colour he could achieve when he diluted it.

1. Otto Rogers, Interview, Otto Rogers’ Studio, Prince Edward County, April 18, 2016.

2. R.G. Lodge, “A History of Synthetic Painting Media with Special Reference to Commercial Materials,” AIC 16th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana, (Washington D.C.: American Institute of Conservation Preprints, June 1988), 129.

3. Otto Rogers, Interview, Otto Rogers’ Studio, Prince Edward County, April 18, 2016.

4. This is because acrylic paint will dry in an hour, whereas oil paint, depending on the thickness of its application, can take days to years to completely cure.

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Single Leaf 2018-19

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Acrylic on Canvas 60 x 54 inches

Above all else, he found that the acrylic gesso ground was so entirely compatible with the acrylic paint medium that he could “re-establish ground at any time”. 5 This was ideal for him because he liked the ability to change his mind mid-way. Rogers’ desire to ‘re-establish ground’ should be read with nuance here. There is the painterly ground layer, which is prepared to receive subsequent layers of paint and prevent the artist’s paint layer from being absorbed and disappearing into the canvas. The reliably dark earthy palette and abstracted elements reminiscent of landscape likewise contribute to a sublime grounding quality in Rogers’ work. There is also the spiritual grounding of the psyche, often achieved through practices such as meditation, or in Rogers’ case, art making.

For Rogers (the spiritual) is deeply embedded in the substrate of existence. It is in his embrace of the corporeal, his reveling in the immediate physicality of materials, and his sensitive observation of the constant interplay of objective phenomena continually occurring around him, that he locates his notion of the sacred. 6

The ability to establish ground through the medium of acrylic paint was as important formally as it was spiritually for Rogers.

Rogers worked in layers, adding paint and building subtle texture. He would also work subtractively. But for Rogers subtraction was a formal maneuver – he would not physically remove layers of paint; he would visually remove them through the addition of just the right colour or layer of gesso. Thus, re-establishing ground when he needed to. With this process of contemplative addition and subtraction, each of Rogers’ final artworks is cohesively and formally resolved. There is also, when one spends the time, their creation story embedded in the strata of acrylic paint and collaged objects. Pertinent to working in layers, Rogers asserted, “if you live in the present, you can’t ignore the past because you will throw away the future.” 7 Sasha Rogers, Otto Rogers’ daughter and a painter in her own right, shares some insight into this process: He would sometimes have a tendency to overdo a painting so he would need to subtract.

Sometimes the colours are subtraction. However, subtraction after the fact means the previous thoughts are still vibrating beneath the surface. He would say “everything is one; everything is a piece or a particle of something that is real”. 8

5. Otto Rogers, Interview, Otto Rogers’ Studio, Prince Edward County, April 18, 2016.

6. R.G. Lodge, “A History of Synthetic Painting Media with Special Reference to Commercial Materials,” AIC 16th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana, (Washington D.C.: American Institute of Conservation Preprints, June 1988), 129.

7. Otto Rogers. Interview, Otto Rogers’ Studio, Prince Edward County, April 18, 2016.

8. Sasha Rogers, Interview, March 23, 2022.

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Rogers’ artwork is a reflection of his philosophy and his faith. Perhaps with Rogers’ works it is their diversity of elements – the traces of their making, seeking, and resolving – that allows them to resonate so strongly as unified truths. He wrote: The breadth and potential of this new age lies in its openness – in its invitation to unity; the modern artist has freed many things from previous practice, and subsequently utilized this diversity to create important expressions of unity. 9

Rogers did not need to abandon diversity to achieve unity, or the particular to engage with the universal, as other modernist artists who moved into ‘pure’ abstraction did. This is because he understood the physical world to be metaphorically entwined with the spiritual world. His incorporation of his own meditative ponderings or the appearance of landscape into the paintings did not make them self-indulgent or landscapes, nor did his textured layers and all-over use of the canvas plane make them tachist, colour field, or expressionistic. He had an uncanny ability to present the familiar without necessarily representing it and a mode of expression that was uniquely his own.

For example, in some works, there is the presence of mountain-like formations. These formations could also be interpreted as architectural. They are familiar without being recognizable. It is in this subtle manner that Rogers wed the particular with the universal and asserted his place within the ideology of the modernist time period. In many cases, one may not immediately think of the landscape were it not for the title of the painting- for instance Water Reflection, 2012, the acrylic and wood tondo exhibited for the first time in this 2022 exhibition. Thusly named, one might be guided to look at the structural collage differently. Could this be a pool of melted spring water with leftover fallen leaves floating upon it? Possibly. What is alluring about this assemblage are the tiers of construction and the subtle allusions to familiar form.

A large number of Rogers’ most recent paintings, created in 2018/2019 shortly before he died suddenly in April 2019, remain untitled. Rogers did not begin his paintings with a preconceived idea, but instead with a Bahá’í passage in mind that he would meditate on; his paintings would often change course in the midst of their making as he followed the flow of ideation mixing with acrylic paint. For this reason he would name his paintings after they were resolved. This late body of work is unique in that it must be navigated without the guidance of his titles. 10

9. Otto Rogers, “Pictorial Concerns Relative to the Exercised Intelligence of the Rational Soul,” in Otto Donald Rogers, (Santa Fe: Radius Books, 2007), 160-161.

10. Sasha Rogers, Interview, March 23, 2022.

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Water Reflection 2012 Acrylic and wood on panel 22 x 22 x 2 inches

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With the application of numerous, subtle layers there is an overt materiality present in Rogers’ abstraction. This aspect of his work sets him distinctly apart from the abstraction practices of his contemporaries. Abstraction in the late 1950s and 1960s was preoccupied with flatness. It was either hard-edge with bold, opaque, coloured layers, like the Montreal hard-edge painters Guido Molinari and Claude Tousignant and the west coast painters Gary Lee Nova, Bodo Pfiefer, and Michael Morris, or soft-edge and thinly painted or stained like Jack Bush or Milly Ristvedt in Toronto and the Washington Colour School, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski. It is the latter style – thin, brightly hued, layers of paint imbibed into the canvas layer to achieve the ultimate flatness – that was championed during this time period by the influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg.

Painters who were painting more thickly (the hard-edge painters included) or working in expressionistic styles were overlooked for inclusion in key exhibitions. It is for this reason that Kenneth Lochhead and Arthur McKay of the Regina Five and Jack Bush of the Toronto Painters Eleven were selected by Greenberg for the pivotal 1964 LACMA exhibition, Post Painterly Abstraction, showcasing the future of abstraction in North America, and other Canadian painters were not. However, Greenberg visited Otto Rogers’ studio in Regina in 1962, and left commenting that Rogers was a ‘big attack’ painter. 11 This declaration must have given pause to Rogers’ contemporaries. He was not using bold colour and he was not staining. His work was completely different from the artists featured in the LACMA exhibition.

Without a doubt, Rogers borrowed from history, and the Washington Colour School artists were in fact strong influences on his work. 12 However, there are also visible nods to Cubism and Constructivism, and often elements abstracted from the Canadian prairie landscape. But what is incredibly unique about Rogers’ practice is that his entire oeuvre holds together cohesively: what Rogers’ art reminds one of most of all is an artwork by Rogers. This is why he is a Big Attack painter: while he reflected the external world he painted from the inside, and he never compromised his authentic expression. It is likely this authenticity of expression that Greenberg observed. Seeking truth, purity and unity, Rogers was his own greatest critic and would edit ruthlessly when he needed to.

11.

Clement Greenberg, “Clement Greenberg’s View of Art on the Prairies: Painting and Sculpture in Prairie Canada Today,” Canadian Art, Vol 20, March-April, 1963. 90-107.

12. Otto Rogers, Interview, Otto Rogers’ Studio, Prince Edward County, April 18, 2016.

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Untitled Collage 2018 Acrylic on Paper 30 x 22 inches

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It is not possible or profitable to think of Otto Rogers’ artwork in isolation from his Bahá’í faith. It is equally important to understand that Rogers’ calling to explore his religious practice through his painting is part of what makes him quintessentially modern. There are a large number of modernist artists who were concerned with channeling the particulars of the individual subconscious into spiritual and universal truth through abstract formal vocabularies. The founder of Der Blaue Reiter (1911–1914), Wassily Kandinsky, was a theosophist who believed that the spiritual could be accurately represented via abstraction, that the avant-garde artist was visionary, and that the spiritual operated in opposition to the “nightmare of the materialistic attitude.” 13 Piet Mondrian, founder of the De Stijl movement (1917-1931), intended his abstract paintings to induce communion with the spiritual via their colour and their (pure) plastic expression. 14 In the 1920s and 1930s, Surrealists such as Andre Bréton believed that pure automatic expression resolved contradictions between dream and reality, leading to a super-reality that was “the new mode of pure expression”.15 The New York-based Abstract Expressionist painters (late 1930s–mid-1950s) were strongly influenced by the Surrealist movement, as were the Montreal-based Automatistes. Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock were interested in channeling automatic subconsciousness into their painting; they were also interested in the spiritual connection gained from what they understood to be pure universal formal language systems and looked to “Primitive art” and “Indian art” to provide visual symbolism. 16 The Automatistes’ founder, Paul-Émile Borduas, penned the Refus Global Manifesto in 1948, which asserted that the magic of automatic expression would free Quebec culture from the strictures of the Catholic Church. 17 In Paul-Émile Borduas: Life and Work, art historian François-Marc Gagnon reflects on Borduas’ attraction to Bréton’s notion of automatic expression: The painter, with no model to imitate and no iconographic program to follow, sets out on an adventure: instead of imitating, the painter must “create.” The old argument of Nature’s design being used to demonstrate the existence of God is turned inside out. It is no longer 18 God who creates like an artist, but the artist who creates like God—ex nihilo, out of nothing.

Concerns with restructuring society based on universal principles and spiritual ideals were part of the Modernist zeitgeist.

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13. Wassily Kandinsky, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911),” in Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds.

Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 87, 88.

14. Kandinsky, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” 86-94; Piet Mondrian, “Dialogue on the New Plastic”, 282-287, and “Neo-Plasticism: The General Principle of Plastic Equivalence”, 287-290, in Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992).

15. André Breton, “The First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)”, in Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds.

Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992. 300 – 305.

16. W. Jackson Rushing, “Ritual and Myth: Native American Culture and Abstract Expressionism”, in The Spiritual in Art (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1886. 273 -295.

17. Paul-Émile Borduas, Refus global Manifesto, (Montreal: Private publisher, Mirtha-Mythe, 1948).

18. François-Marc Gagnon, Paul-Émile Borduas: Life and Work, (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2014). 46. https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/paul-emile-borduas/

Single Leaf with Red 2018 Acrylic on Canvas 60 x 54 inches

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Fueled first by a backlash against the industrial revolution, then fomented by the First and Second World Wars, art practitioners seeking answers and solace for themselves served as guides for universal truth and spiritual meaning. Otto Rogers would not have considered his creation to be like that of God, but he did believe that “nature is the companion for 19 conceptualization,” and that the physical world was infused with the spiritual world.

Tempered by the materiality of the natural world and the physicality of medium and process, Rogers’ evocations suggest moments rooted in timeless temporality, synthesized by the marriage of the sublime and the ground.

Folded Letter 2016 Zinc plated steel, acrylic, fibre paste coating 39 x 34 x 3 inches 19. Otto Rogers, “Pictorial Concerns Relative to the Exercised Intelligence of the Rational Soul,” in Otto Donald Rogers, (Santa Fe: Radius Books, 2007), 157.

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Otto Rogers Otto Donald Rogers (1935-2019) taught at the University of Saskatchewan (1959-1988) after receiving his MA in Fine Art from the University of Wisconsin. Rogers helped sustain the Emma Lake Workshops, a meeting place for some of North America’s leading artists including Barnett Newman, Jules Olitski and Rogers himself. For the last two decades of his life, he maintained an active studio practice in Prince Edward County.

Rogers’ work is held in more than 30 public collections including: the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

He has been represented by the Oeno Gallery since 2006.

There are few artists, very few, whose work has about it a kind of magic; they sing their own song. Otto Rogers is one of these special few. I love what he does. ~ Sir Anthony Caro

Untitled (Tondo Landscape) Acrylic and collage on panel 36 x 36 x 2 inches

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