Critical Responses & Review Excerpts

Critical Responses

Fragments... From a Day's Caravan
Barbara’s 2007 solo exhibition at Gráficas Gallery, Tucson.
Read the exhibition essay, written by Jan Ernst Adlmann.

Barbara Rogers
Natural Facts/Unnatural Acts
Barbara’s 2001-2 solo exhibition at Tucson Museum of Art.
Read the exhibition essay, written by Julie Sasse, Curator of Contemporary Art.

Review Excerpts

“(Her) design is not random, but rather symbolic as would be motifs found in Native-American pottery or Islamic scriptural and mosque paintings.  Decoration in these instances conveys meaning, and this is what Barbara Rogers has achieved in her brilliantly pigmented, carefully choreographed canvases.  Her use of multiple layers of imagery is stunning.”

—Dr. Lew Deitch, Editor, Artbook of the New West
Artist Profile in Fall/Winter 2005-06 edition

Gardens of Paradise: Bustan al Janaa Exhibition
American artist Barbara Rogers looks to nature as Allah’s gift of riches and visiting gardens as one of the great rewards of life. To her the garden is a protected, safe space of dialogue with nature. And nature in the garden is colorful in its beauty. As she puts it: “we’ve been given eyes to see the beauty of the stunning colors of nature! My works try to capture the intensity of this experience.” Roger’s works are parables of our relationship to nature as a sign of abundant grace.

The garden is a place of refuge, comfort, sumptuous and often formal beauty, and it is a place to enjoy the supreme felicity. These paintings and drawings are also dialogues of paint, color, form and space that reveal the garden’s often hidden beauties. In its perpetual ideal, the garden allows no fatigue, injury or grieving to enter. In the gardens of paradise, only the substance of ease, sustenance and bliss flow forth in beauty. Therefore, entering the garden is an ideal moment of life, and a celebration of the richness and vibrancy of creation.

"Critics have compared the artist’s work with that of 16th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, an assessment that Rogers understands. 'Bosch had elements of the grotesque, which set off the beauty,' she says. 'I, too, believe you can’t have one without the other.'”

“What remains consistent in Rogers’ work is the garden and her love of and respect for nature. From her earliest airbrushed paintings depicting nature as a pleasurable paradise—to her acrylics delineating nature as sublime destroyer to her oil paintings expressing nature as a submissive participant in the formal garden—to her mature works depicting nature as having won the battle. Rogers continues to revel in the awesome beauty and power of the elements and humankind’s relationship with the life forms that exist within them.”

“Hers are colors found in antique kimonos; delicious and beautiful as clothes, they pour over the senses. Rogers has been deciphering nature for decades. It is as if she is translating poetry written in a foreign language. She has become an expert in the tongue of flowers and foliage. In these paintings, disparate elements are combined as they are not in nature: a budding flower soaring like a large bird in the brown sky; a giant conical tree; lily pads floating in the gold-brown sky. She controls them like a ringmaster, isolating, sectioning, often going for a near-Japanese formalism combined with the baroque.”

“It is clear that Rogers sees two conflicting things in gardens. On one hand, there is prolific growth and the corresponding death and rot. Anyone who gardens knows the smell of compost and the sponginess of good dirt. Rogers fills her paintings with that kind of fecundity. There are vines and tendrils all over the place. That kind of growth is unruly and, more important, uncontrollable. But, on the other hand, there is the organization of the formal garden, which is all right angles and clean circles. Rogers pits the two drives against each other. Humans try to control their gardens, but the gardens overgrow their trellises and borders.”

“Rogers’ vision of the garden as a microcosm of the struggles and cycles of our earthly condition reawakens us to the beauty and allegory found in our surrounding planted world. This is not a reminder cloaked in fear; it is one of simple promise and possibility. Though it seems like the garden may be the only place where man is able to physically guide and control the random chaos of nature, it is Rogers’ work that shows us the beauty in living inside as well as outside of these ordained boundaries. And while gardens may be seen as constrictive and limiting to the force and power of nature, all this is diminished by the beautiful simplicity depicted in the fresh blossoms of a flower.”

“Her most recent works are thick, energetic mixed-media paintings that make an explicit connection between garden spaces and the spaces of the female body. They no longer imitate untamed nature: These are gardens, carefully constructed and cultivated piece by piece. “Structuring Nature,” a 1994 mixed-media on linen and canvas over wood panels, is a collage of photos of plants and palm tee bark and thick paint that in places rises three-dimensionally off the canvas. The garden, from the Garden of Eden to the garden courtyards in medieval illuminations, has long been a metaphor of female inner space. With her very contemporary assemblages of mixed-media, Rogers pushes the metaphor along. The multiplicity of materials resonates with modern women’s efforts to improvise a new kind of life, piece by piece.”

“Such paths to the past are on equal footing with the masterpieces of old roman landscape painting, such as the great augustan fresco “garden of Livia” at Prima Porta. Rogers’ states “through continued work in realism, which has always included the importance of landscape, my work is positioning women’s gardens as important sites in this tradition.”