Brett Cody Rogers’ paintings are phantasms of common subjects, some rooted in the modernist painting tradition, and symbolic of looking. In each picture, the volatile painted space is in constant flux, made up of a vocabulary of stylized marks, evanescent stains, and aggressive color combinations. The marks at once fragment the identity of the subject and are the very make-up of the image. Their construction produces an illusion of immediacy where both image and gesture are taking place simultaneously on a thinly painted surface.

While the inclusion of smaller, more intimately-sized self-portraits bring the work into the realm of the personal and self-reflective, they propose a shifting identity that is only as specific as the contour of the head. Taken in the context of fragmented mirrors, emptily constructed landscapes of rocks and trees, self-reflexive streetlamps emitting an artificial fluorescent light, the paintings play on the slippery nature of perception, and the illusion of things both natural and synthetic.

 In “Likeness,” the tall street lamps with their toxic glow position themselves as a source of light for the surrounding paintings. The lamps stand like figures in close proximity to one another and emerge out of an ethereal field of grey stains and sketchy marks. 

 The paintings of mirrors resist reflection, returning an arrangement of paint marks. They refuse to reveal the space surrounding them, and instead make reference back to the painted surface. 

 The landscape paintings create gaps between what is represented and how it is depicted, where the (subject) matter is replaced by abstract events that organize an image.