Into the Haunted Imagination of Jonathan Rogers
In 2003, I had the privilege of organizing Jonathan Rogers’ first solo exhibition, Multiple Spirit, as curator for the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University. One of the most powerful paintings from this show of hard-hitting allegorical tableau was Little Dancer (now part of the Castellani’s permanent collection), a scene of momentary joy in the midst of a sinister, shadowy prison. Many in the audience at the time wondered—with a shudder of apprehension—what was going on in the other rooms of that glowering Victorian house.

With his new show of drawings and paintings at the Gateway Gallery in Buffalo, Multiple Spirit 2—Drawings and Paintings by the Many and Only Jonathan Rogers, Rogers offers to take us by the hand and lead a tour of that ominous environment introduced five years ago.

This Time Maybe It’s the Angel of Death

Before following Rogers up the stairs shown in Little Dancer, we should take a deep breath, look around, and consider some of the components of his unique, animation-inspired style on view. One series of drawings shows a lanky, anonymous figure running, sometimes in ecstasy and sometimes in terror or exhaustion. Each drawing incorporates multiple “frames” of the same figure in action—a demonstration of Rogers’s easy mastery of animation (garnered from a previous career as an animator and producer for Disney, Marvel, and the CBC). These drawings introduce many of the main components of Rogers’s paintings: neutral, “Everyman” figures, multiplicity of action or emotion, and an expressionistic tendency to distort the human form. But they leave an important question open: Where are these figures running from and where are they running to?

The Lovers series of drawings introduces another tenet of Rogers’ work: elemental dichotomies (light/dark, good/evil, male/female). Each of the Lovers drawings depicts a dark, hairy, male figure and a light, smooth, female figure entwined, embracing and copulating in a sort of R-rated personification of the yin/yang. The backgrounds of most of these drawings are also half-dark and half-light, amplifying the sense of gender-coded dichotomy. The faces of these lovers are all obscured, but the pairs are rendered with Rogers’ expressive detail and easy mastery of the human form. Like the running figures, the Lovers convey a certain archetypal ambiguity; they may be seen as warm-up exercises for the allegorical dances to come.

Perhaps the most distinctive and ubiquitous of Rogers’s dramatis personae are his Synthesized Expression figures—monochromatic, Muppet-like beings that one young Rogers fan has dubbed “the gumdrop people.” These serve as Rogers’ Greek chorus or peanut gallery, demonstrating the full range of human emotion by virtue of their infinite plasticity of expression. They seem to exist solely to characterize states of joy, rage, hysteria, envy, and ennui, personifying emotions in a scene often projected by the protagonist.

With the gumdrop people warmed up and waiting in the wings, it’s time accept Rogers’ invitation to explore the dark world introduced in Little Dancer. If the aforementioned drawings are Rogers’s sketchbook, his large canvasses—often in diptychs or triptychs—are his Sistine Chapel ceiling. Rogers draws as much from the Renaissance masters and Gothic altarpieces as he does from Looney Tunes to create his biographical allegories such as Group Self Portrait (1, 2 & 3): three acts of a multiple personality passion play. Here, the complex iconography of Rogers’ experience—including a childhood of cult-controlled, ritualistic abuse, Kerouac-esque world travels, and Hollywood highs and lows as an adult—is spun into multiple characters. Color-coded like the gumdrop people, these purple, orange and green doppelgängers come together and rage apart in a constant state of psycho-kinetic flux. The checkerboard floor plane under their feet fragments as Rogers’ multiple selves become less grounded, while the bucolic landscape in the background, a symbol of escape from his torment, expands until, in the final panel of the triptych, it becomes a river of light in the center of the scene. In this last panel as well, the central persona of young Jonathan becomes a completely fragmented, black paper silhouette. This residual self is shattered by the river of light, while a white, spectral figure is released in a leap of elation. Is this the liberation of pure spirit, free from multivalent mortal baggage?

Carl Jung posits that the house may be a symbol for the human psyche itself (see Man and His Symbols). The architecture and apartments of this archetypal house may be explored through dreams or waking analysis as a spatial means of mapping the mind. Such a psychological model comes to mind when considering the next major triptych: Maybe This Time It’s the Angel of Death, Nap Time and House Call. With Little Dancer as a point of departure, these paintings take us to the upper chambers of Rogers’s house, at once a real house from his childhood and a multi-chambered set for his uncanny personal allegories. We soon find that the ensemble from the Group Self Portraits lives here too. But this is a darker stage for them, decorated in shades of inky black and lurid, blood red. The architecture takes on a nightmarish, funhouse quality; wall planes stretch and bleed into one another amid the regularity of floral-patterned, Victorian wallpaper. Balusters and bedsteads resemble spiked iron railings, imprisoning the figures rather than comforting them with their protection. The bizarre reality of the “group home” depicted is only half-concealed by Rogers’s dreamy distortions: Pentagrams are incorporated into stained glass and quilt patterns, the cheery connotations of such crafts mocked by their diabolical patterns.

House Call

House Call is the most harrowing installment in Rogers’ “house” series. In this bedroom scene, three ashen, black-clad figures stand at the foot of a large bed, like attendees at an Addams Family reunion or members of Clive Barker’s band of cenobites. The gaunt central figure leers at the occupant of the bed, piercing him—and the audience—with his gaze and reflecting the cringing occupant in his mirrored glasses. The female member of the trio pre-empts any resistance by putting her finger to her lips in a silencing gesture. A vista into an adjoining bathroom reveals a bloody basin, suggesting the nefarious nature of this “house call.” The basin is the most distorted and impressionistic element in the composition, as if Rogers were actively struggling to paint—and therefore to fully remember—the crimson reality smeared there. At the margins of the scene, resident versions of the gumdrop people laugh hysterically at whatever has transpired. As we are forced to survey the scene from the point of view of the occupant of the bed, Rogers conveys fear, humiliation and helplessness in a visceral, unavoidable way. We can only hope, as perhaps Rogers does, that this memory is hybridized with dreams and elements of personal mythology, mitigating its blunt, horrific implications.

Rogers’ own likeness presides over the exhibition in his Self Portrait: half survivor and half puppet-master of the complex, cartoon world he’s conjured up. Rogers, brush raised like a magic wand, exudes a Whitmanesque mania, apparently laughing at the absurdity of his own, ongoing excavation of memory and self. Rogers channels his experiences—replete with personal torture, mental fragmentation, and tenuous dances along the edge of the void—into abject scuffles of visionary imagery. Surely, it’s a good sign that Rogers has been able to venture up the stairs shown in Little Dancer, and revisit some of those rooms in the haunted house of his past.

Through May 23 at the Gateway Gallery, 141 Elmwood Avenue (886-6888). At 8pm this Friday, May 9, Rogers will give a talk about his work.