Show Provides Blend of Sincerity, Pretension

“I am nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too?”

With these words borrowed from a poem by Emily Dickinson, Roy David Rogers invites us to search our souls. In his current installation, he has set a stage of moody introspection and has even laid out the paper and pen for our confession, our lament or perhaps even our defiant celebration of the self.

The installation serves as a foyer to an exhibition of Rogers’ recent paintings at the Felicita Foundation Gallery (247 South Kalmia, Escondido, through Nov. 15). Dickinson’s three phrases, neatly scribed in pale blue neon, span three of the room’s mottled blue walls and offer the space its sole illumination. A raised platform with checkerboard floor juts forward at a diagonal. On it stands an antique wooden desk, with writer’s implements at the ready--paper, pen, inkwell and candle. The key to the desk, attached to a red ribbon, lies on the floor nearby.

Rogers, with Dickinson’s help, poses a constructive challenge--to define one’s identity. At the same time, he stresses the futility of a response through the title of his show, “Speaking into the Void.” This, too, is a line of Dickinson’s, but this time quoted from Thoreau, refering to a life spent creating work that never reaches an audience. It is not necessarily the vanity of the artist’s life that comes through here, however. The reference could be, possibly, to all life lived in pursuit of material rewards.

Rogers’ paintings, like his installation, reveal an urgency and sincerity of purpose. Ironically, however, many of the paintings appear glib and pretentious after the probing humility of the installation. Rogers, an Escondido artist who teaches at Palomar College, repeatedly makes reference to important artists and writers of the past, but with hardly an echo of their wit and wisdom.

In “A Portrait of Nobody’s Mother,” he evokes the memory of Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother. Rogers’ abbreviated, geometric version of Whistler’s work is mounted onto a larger painting, and linked by painted dashes to a small jar in the center of the canvas. The dotted line then rebounds off the jar, makes a loop and exits the frame. The logic of the images is obscure, and their execution uninspired.

Another painting refers to Magritte’s conceptual conundrum, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe), and this time, Rogers manages to expand on Magritte’s idea rather than shrinking it to lifelessness, as he does with Whistler. In “This is Not a Princess,” Rogers presents an aqua blue “princess-style” telephone as an icon, upon a large, deep blue canvas.

Here, Rogers makes the same punning, circular argument as Magritte: he presents a convincing image of an object while verbally denying that the image and the object are the same thing. Also striking a vein of social critique, Rogers calls attention to the absurdity of giving a royal title to a mundane machine. Our euphemistic culture, he seems to say, aims to aggrandize, but in the end offers only the cheapest form of praise.

Despite the unevenness of Rogers’ imagery, his compositions remain remarkably consistent, all adhering to a format that lends high drama to each work, even when the imagery is lackluster or trite. A solid, dark color dominates each large canvas. Lines subtly incised into the painted surface extend from each corner of the canvas into the center, converging on one central image in each painting. Most of the images--whether telephones, bottles or vases of flowers--are set within an inner, painted frame in the shape of a traditional icon, with arched or pointed top and occasionally, an accent of gold leaf.

The format magnifies the significance of these central images, often undeservedly, but effectively, giving the impression of looking through a tunnel, focusing from the vast, amorphous void to the immediate, material present in the search for meaning.

Seen in a large group, the paintings have an impressive presence. Individually, however, the burden of their dramatic form often feels too great, and the imagery pales in comparison to the magnitude of Rogers’ intent.