Roger Woods
Roger Woods 1945-2002 Modern Allegories
Art is always mysterious and Roger’s art is especially so: he was private about it to the point of secrecy. He showed only once, framed only 3 pieces, even his closest friends saw almost nothing. In the early 70s when he left the Royal College, the future of painting was under attack from photography and post modern linguistic theory. How could one take on the great modernists, Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, in such a climate?
Objet’s D’Art is about representation and articulates the problems which preoccupied Roger. Painting is symbolised by the solids to which all forms can be reduced, (the modelling indicates the transference of objects from 3D to 2D) and by the delicate carousel of watercolours. The whole history of art is referenced by the pyramid,(also used by Duchamp) then the classical columns of C18th and C19th and the split planes of cubism.
The columns, in puce and baby blue, fashion colours, are, I think, a delicate reference to the use of classical architecture in landscape, for example by Gainsborough, to enhance the social status of his sitters. It’s architectural haute couture. Their marble substance, separated onto another plane, is like faux marbling popular in interior decoration..
The clock dominates the whole as does the waterwheel, an image used by Duchamp in
’ The Bride stripped Bare by the Bachelors’ to represent desire and the shadowy columns are male and female symbols. Its size suggests that it stands for the motivating force not just of sexual desire, but of the totality of men’s relationships with women.(When Roger’s mother died he said "there’s no-one to paint for any more").It also signifies the huge importance of Duchamp in the history of art .
The head with its electrodes represents the mapping of the unconscious by psychoanalysis, especially Freud. (There is a biographical note here referring to his father’s ECT). An industrial/televisual device is fixed to the face with its mirror mask ambiguously protecting and eroding the features of the head; it points to the debate about how industry, commerce, advertising have intruded upon the consciousness of the individual and manipulate the way we perceive the world.
Andy Warhol was being celebrated for his soup cans, but here the mannerisms of Pop Art are given a magic by Roger’s extraordinary touch and technique. He layers the watercolour with immaculate precision, retaining luminosity of colour but creating a printlike density of hue.
Many artists seek a contemporary idiom by total rejection of the past, but this has its dangers. Christopher Bollas in "The Shadow of the Object" says ’the loss of one’s personal history is a catastrophe, from which there may well be no recovery’. For Roger, personal history and culture were metaphors for each other: just as our personal history helps us create structures for understanding reality and phantasy, the culture of the past provides material for this same process. It was of paramount importance to him to renegotiate a relationship with the history of art in a way which filtered it through the great philosophical developments of modernism and post modernism: psychoanalysis, structuralism, semiotics. When he was teaching drawing he would often cast slides over the models to breakup the student’s preconceptions of the forms. His own voracious reading had a similar function. His work is mainly about the constant and radical reformulation of ideas through mental processes,( instinct, imagination, memory etc.) i.e. the fluidity and multi layering of consciousness.
His technique became a metaphor for this. He moved on
from the sleek rendering of Objets D’Art through a series of mixed media figure studies. Inspired by Rodin, he began to employ distortion, and changes of focus and scale, constantly breaking open and reworking the images. Influenced later by Jim Dine, Kitaj and Bacon, he translated this into oil, creating different fields of perception and his subtle use of contrapuntal colour is an equivalent for the way in which our mental processes interpenetrate.
In‘Age of Lead’(after Ingres, l’Age d’Or) Roger takes on the great figurative compositions of Poussin, Tiepolo, Ingres. Instead of an idealised landscape or interior, he uses imagery from the stage sets of Hollywood musicals. In place of the highly mannered dance groups, these teeming figures, in a Danteesque bacchanal show people in a variety of relationships. These may be our different perceptions of one or several relationships, but also represent the life of desire, of instinct, of the id. The gyroscope, a perfect geometric form, stands for the life of the intellect and the superego and these are linked by the stairway and spiral, both of which allow for movement down as well as up, so this is not about the progress of the soul but about an ongoing psychic process. It is an allegory of consciousness and desire.
Simone Witney 1.10.07
