Terry Rodgers

But, at the same time, there’s something a little uncomfortable about the scene. Here are these culturally significant people, mingling in this architecturally significant room, and not one of them is engaged with any other one, as if the subjects are incapable of personal interaction. There is very little conversation, no eye contact. It’s like they’re simultaneously living in a world of material comfort and psychosocial discomfort. I mean, these people have arrived, haven’t they? They have money and things, and they’re naked! What more is there to life?
‘Elevate or disguise the facts as you will,’ says Richard Vine, managing editor and writer for Art In America, ‘In the end, every nude figure is at some fundamental level about sex, or ‘desire’ – to use its polite-society name. That impulse, as a certain Dr Freud and others have pointed out, can take some complicated turns.’

Rodgers does this on purpose. He ‘monkeys with’ our obsession with beauty and the realm of desire, and he does it using the values that we hold dearest: our deeply ingrained knowledge that beautifuller is better.
‘
Most people are looking for a personal connection,’ says Rodgers from his Columbus, Ohio home. ‘And personal connection is something you can’t sell. You can, however, market sex or goods. In fact, our culture encourages you to buy towards satisfaction.’

His paintings depict what most people would call Personal Satisfaction. His subjects have youth, wealth, health. They display their fat-free bodies without the slightest hint of self-consciousness. And yet, their facial expressions betray something lacking. ‘There is no clear route to personal satisfaction,’ Rodgers explains. ‘So, very often, what we see is the external and what we interpret is the external, and we skip who’s really there.’

The process by which he creates his masterpieces is very complex. First, he finds real people on the street (no, these people don’t all exist in Columbus, Ohio. Terry travels around the world, spending his summers in St Tropez), and invites them back to his studio where he photographs them. He works with the photos in the computer until he finds an arrangement that appeals to him, then he attacks the canvas. To get the details just right, he blows up the photos and works from the enlarged images.

The result is a fascinating combination of collage and social reportage where the viewer can’t help but get caught up in the energy of the scene. Rodgers refers to this energy as ‘vectors.’

‘I’m interested in the underlying disquiet that pervades the most seemingly happy situations. When you have this much comfort on the surface, it suggests something else as well – forces that interact within the pictures. You get this intricate web of interconnecting and missing and crossing vectors.’

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Rodgers’ Apotheosis of Pleasure, a 6” by 12” painting that debuted in Germany this past summer. Here is a snapshot of the swankest party that ever existed. There are over a dozen revellers in various states of undress mingling in the room, and because of the immense size of the canvas, some of the subjects in this painting are literally larger than life.

As in all of Rodgers’ pieces, there is no eye contact. A topless woman in the foreground draws us into the painting with a glance that grazes our left hip. Behind her, a topless man watches a Paris Hilton look-alike who, in turn, is glancing at our ‘hostess,’ creating a triangle of vectors that spans the breadth of the painting. As we move through the crowd into the back of the room, we become completely ensnared in Rodgers’ not-so-invisible web of vectors created by the other party-goers.

‘This painting is about everything that goes on in the world,’ says Rodgers. ‘It’s a metaphor for how much is going on all the time, and the struggle people have navigating the complexity. There are all races, all creeds, Christians and hedonists alike. Everybody is invited to this party.’

The painting Alternative Fictions depicts a similar scene. The architecture of the house suggests a swank LA or Florida pad that would make an interior designer drool:

an intricate mantelpiece, cashmere throw over crushed velvet upholstery. Yet, there’s something in the posture of the party-goers (maybe in the precarious tilt of the blonde girl’s martini glass) that suggests nonchalance, bordering on frustration.

‘The people in this painting are living in the moment of their next interaction, and you get the sense that it may or may not be working at the time. There is a real contrast between the exterior grandeur and the much more intimate, delicate balance of the individuals internally.’

In the moment that this painting occurs, there is an edgy juxtaposition between the obvious comfort of the surroundings and the subtle discomfort of the individuals involved. As if they are all suspects in a beautiful-person murder mystery or they are waiting for someone else to pull out the first bag of coke. Whatever is going through their heads at that moment, they are not satisfied.

‘There are no signposts. The puzzle is: how might I find something satisfying to me? I can go from bedroom to bedroom, but is that actually a solution? When you live in a world of limitless comfort, how do you get to a place of satisfaction?’

Just Like the Night depicts a less charged (but just as sexy) atmosphere. Here, the object of the painting is a solitary semi-nude woman who is completely involved in her own personal space – even as a cocktail party swirls around her. We are at once struck by the strength of this independent woman (she’s naked at a party!) and her stark vulnerability (she’s naked … well, you get the idea).
While the subjects of Rodgers’ paintings tend not to interact with one another, there is a certain placidity in their expressions, as if each of them has found that realm of Personal Satisfaction and they no longer require human interaction to appear happy. This is, of course, the goal of any good advertising image.

‘The painting is not about these quote-unquote well-to-do kids. It’s about the combination of those kids, these places, these bodies in which we live, these clothes we have and the infinite criss-crossing of vectors. Everything’s happening all the time, but we’re focused right where our eyes are – in our own space – and we’re very proud of it. That’s where people actually live.’

For Rodgers, Personal Satisfaction comes in the form of his relationship with his wife and his painting. Regarding his wife, he is very private. Regarding his paintings, he is loquacious.

‘The duality of stuff is what’s interesting to me – how something can be both real and a metaphor at the same time. The person in a painting is a quote-unquote person. But whenever somebody looks at that person – and let’s say she’s naked – they’re going to have their own interpretation of who she is before they’ve even talked to her. So this woman is two things simultaneously: she’s herself and she’s the interpretation that’s inevitable.’

In Shades of Olympus, Rodgers gives us a taste of what he means. The main figure in this painting is a striking black woman. Like the other party people, she is confident, composed, and, despite the fact that she is half-naked, completely unself-conscious. We admire this woman for her classical beauty and her carriage, in much the same way we admire the design of the house itself, as a timeless work of art.

And yet, when this house was constructed, a hundred years ago, there was no way in hell a black woman could have stood like this, as the centerpiece of a fabulous soiree. This architecture bespeaks a certain conservative era when an ethnic minority could not have been this comfortable. There is, then, a certain political undercurrent here, which suggests that Freedom is a means to Personal Satisfaction.

You may have noticed Paris Hilton lingering in the background of this party. Rodgers invited her here on purpose. ‘Paris has become a key figure in the world. Very few of us have met her, and yet we all have an opinion about her.

‘She’s a gorgeous woman by the standards of our culture,’ says Rodgers, ‘but it doesn’t say anything about who she is. That’s one of the key things about our society. It generates ideas about what people are supposed to look like, where we are supposed to have fun.’

Rodgers loves the details of art. He admires classical painters like Degas and Velazquez who painted Philip IV of Spain with such honest detail that the viewer gained a deeper understanding about the psyche of the King. Rodgers is fascinated by the particularities of each of our constitutions: the hands, the noses, the fingernails. We gain such intimacy with each figure, based on certain gestures, carriage and stature, seeing how the skin tone is slightly different for each human form.