Con Barba Jose, Sin Barba Maria Painting

I'm Alan Rogers, a multi-media visual artist born in South Yorkshire (UK), now resident in Sant' Elena, Venice, Italy. My creative practice and career has been varied and in addition to working as an artist, I have also worked in Arts Education, Creative Events Management and as a DJ. These practises intertwine and inform each other. I'm inspired by places where history is writ large upon archtiectural fabric, and the detritus of past civilisations is scattered throughout the present. Places like Venice, Cairo, Jodhpur, Trivandrum... Rather than capturing a ‘moment in time’ some of these paintings represent ‘multiple times’. This is manifest both through the process of building and excavating surfaces and in the subject matter, which reveals actions though time - either man-made and natural. I struggle with the materials, forms and colours that might define a place, until their aesthetic begins to speak back to me. The resulting dialogue defines the style of each piece, each period. The construction of the two-dimensional space, the relationship between illusion and object, has occupied me all my working life as an artist. Norbert Lynton wrote of my work: “A visit to Italy, years ago, taught him the pleasure of facades – I think it is not just that there are such cunningly wrought facades in Italy, but also that the street or piazza surface runs slap up against them often, without the hiatus of a pavement, that gives them an extra vividness. In any case, all Rogers’ images have something architectural about them, standing up before our eyes, whether large or small and announcing themselves as flat objects before we feel the sensations of movement and space worked into them”. ‘Syzygy’ touring exhibition catalogue essay, 1999, ISBN 0 903189 62 3 Whether the images tend towards the abstract or realistic, is the idea of exploring relationships between opposing forces excites me: order and chaos, creation and destruction, present and distant, urgent and aloof, controlled and expressive, rough and smooth...the list is long. Reconciling and balancing them can determine the sucess of the work. Occurring simultaneously and instinctively with the action of layering materials, is the layering of meanings and references. These are then excavated, revealed, sanded, undone. SSome images never entirely resolve.