Mat Rogers’s paintings present the sublime anonymity of the urban condition, with its simultaneously liberating and alienating effects, its freedom and its loneliness. This is represented, here, through scenes of crowds, in various modes and speeds of movement. All of the scenes are observed from an elevated position, with a detached eye that looks dispassionately down, seeking grain and texture, the pattern within an ever-shifting dynamic system. It selects instants and then frames them, freezes these complex interlocking tracks and trajectories, into moments of proximity and propinquity and abstract formal relation. Rogers frames the syncopated rhythms of urban life, the pace and the stillness, the urgency and the calm.
Rarely do the solitary figures in these paintings address one another, indicate any relation or intimacy, incline together. Rogers shows us the loose camaraderie of strangers in a mass, and the compositions that open and close instantaneously with their passage. He captures the state of being alone within an urban crowd: the runner, the newspaper reader, the figure who waits, abstractedly, to cross the street.
But there is also an attention to the space between, the absence where someone has just stepped away, the field around and between these bodies as they move through space. And in the same way, Rogers meanders between abstraction and figuration. His paintings hold to the human figure just as they erode it, rub it away, efface and blur and paint it over.
The process of making the paintings is one of subtraction, of figures painted and sanded away and then painted again, taking on different configurations and comportments each time. Sometimes by the end there is barely a figure left at all; what remains is a vestige, a patinaed surface with the linear, scratched quality of an etching. There is a play, then, between the gritty texture and depth of the figures, and the glossy, flat surface of the colour field between them. But throughout the series, the human figure remains ever present. Whether as a solid, drawn body, or a faint dark trace hovering beneath a coloured surface, or a series of abstracted bobbing heads, floating as through fog or haze, or, finally, as a silhouetted restless line – the figure, that link to the world, always endures.
Essay by Naomi Stead