Depingere: picturing, tinting. On the paintings of Matt Rogers.

Picturing. Picture this: the painter, painting. What does he see, what seeing does he mobilise and what does he bring into view? What is he depicting? To `depict’ means to portray, to paint a description of, to put something down, to sketch or imagine something, to picture it. Portrayal and drawing are cognate terms; both hinge on the act of drawing (out), of dragging or pulling (forth). `Depict’ is from Latin de- = down/out and pingere = to paint. The painter lays down paint, he applies, he works a surface to bring it to surfectance. Pingere also means to embroider, decorate, ornament; to pick out the lineaments and articulations of a foundation, a base. Such picking-out is selective, evidently. The etymon *PIK means to decorate with cut marks, variegate (Greek: poikilos), adorn with colour. The depicter choses, severs, delineates, puts into relief, leverages, lifts, foregrounds, enables the possible and the com-possible to emerge in variegated, chromatic profusion. It is a mark-making work, but not one that incises or cuts outlines and figures. There is no linework; only borderlines, zones and interstices. The painter draws-out of a (back) ground in ways that permit that ground to remain simultaneously grounded and imperiled. This surfectance of the ground never coalesces; yet it produces consilience among its component parts. Remaining grounded, the background withdraws and conceals; but its disturbance by an act of depiction, of picking-out and indefinitely variegating, means that the ground also surges and presents itself to view; it becomes a seeing, an idea (Greek: eidein, eidos); and a way of looking, a theory (Greek: theorein, theorea).

Here, drawing, portrayal and depiction are not a matter of dragging implement across surface to leave tracks that configure or bind shapes. If anything, they are pro-tractive—they expand out of a centre of gravity, a corpus, an observing eye, an attuned mind, an attentive ear. They proceed by the divergence of compasses and the gaping of chasms. These stains, disfigurations, smears, bleared smirches, speckles and spots maculate and mask—which is to say that they are cosmetic (or cosmimetic; from Greek: cosmos = order, measure; cosmema = ornament; mimesis = imitation); that they simultaneously conceal and reveal in the same gesture.

The ground of painting (the Earth)—in its double sense of logic or rationale and underlying substrate or foundational base—is here indistinguishable from any figurative or other superstrate. There are no figures over and above grounds and no layers—although the works show the trace of having been made by layering and overlaying washes and glazes; some times building up densities of solid colour and other times leaving thin, blotchy, threadbare films. With these chromatic gatherings, agglomerations and scintillations—or else dilations, suspensions, condensations and dissolutions—surfaces become translucent to underlying luminous grounds; ground and surface, context and content, object and subject become interchangeable and form withdraws favor of networks, fields and milieus.

Transacting. In its earliest thirteenth century use, the word `painting’ meant `to colour surfaces with paint.’ So the painter is fundamentally a colorist, a stainer, a tinter, a tinger, a tincturer, a dyer. `Tint’ is from Latin: tinct, tinctus and tingere = to dye, to hue; and the etymon *TENG = to moisten, soak, dunk. Old Norse: steina means `to paint,’ while Middle English: disteyn and Old French: desteindre mean to `to remove the colour,’ to `discolor.’ To `disdain’—to treat as unworthy, to disrespect or render indecent, to scorn, refuse or repudiate—derives from Old French: deigner, Latin: dingus, English: deign = deem worthy or fit, decent, dignified, seemly. Consider the manner in which ethics and aesthetics are enmeshed in this lexicon of colour around the etymon *DEK = to take, accept, greet, acknowledge, hold, sustain; Greek: dokein = to appear, seem; Latin: decus = grace—a theatrical term associating decent, seemly appearance with appropriate dress and ornament (`are you decent?’). In colouring, tinting, dyeing, staining, the painter also sustains. His work is one of care and `solicitude’—in the sense of German: sorge = concernful attentiveness through which something is solicited-forth, emerges and surges into presence. He takes care in seeing what comes, in finding the means to produce it.

Once he painted crowds; singularities and sentinels that, like swarms, strangely formed communities. He painted the spaces between them. He painted zones of exchange that were never labeled or planned-for, but that simply emerged by happenstance. He painted these overlaps and gaps as they formed and dissolved, leaving only the stains of heads and the smears of bodies: only content on the way to becoming- context. Now he sees a different space of exchange—between pure, residual yet reminiscent forms: foliage, canopy, mist, cloud, sky, field, knoll, undulation; disturbed terrains occupying the barest, most fragile, evanescent places; nothing but remnants and afterimages, recollections and phantasms. Everything is in flux, in transition, on the verge of inflection and disappearance. No one is in sight. The crowds have abandoned the world like the gods; always-already withdrawn. Yet left alone—to their own devising— these landscapes gather and intensify: becoming saturated, permeated and relieved of one burden so as to take on a different kind of foundational gravity. Nothing leaves the surface and nothing abandons the ground. Everything is the pure transaction, modulation and conjugation of a foundation that is interminably applied, plied and folded into itself to the point of vanishing.

Embroidering. Is the painter’s work non-figurative, abstract? Are the landscapes that he sees and paints real, realistic? Is not every painted landscape in some way concocted and imagined so that its very unrealistic-ness might better convey the presence and force of the real? Evidently these depictions are landscapes, but the format is `portrait.’ What takes place in this swapping of frames, of the default horizontality of a landscape for the verticality of a portrait? Suddenly the once dilated, prostrate expanse collects into the comportment and demeanor of a subject. There is no perspective and no depth. Only the evanescent surface and surfeit of production. The scenes flatten and Gather into so many ciphers of the real. The chromatic register has its own logic, elaborated in the presence and time of painting rather than in advance. Colours are only marginally indicative; they are not accurate but curated—which is to say that they solicit a parallel universe that magnifies instead of replicating the real.

We do not see representations — of three-dimensional spaces; of mountains and valleys, skies and plains. We see presentations — not mimesis but poiesis, production. These paintings do not depict the contours and forms of places but rather places in- formation, in the process of being made (and made-up); places coming-into-being, advancing and retreating, being produced and producing themselves. As a collective seeing and constellation of depictions these paintings portray the tracks of one presence—one landscape that is on the way, in train and in the midst of transaction, conjugation, inflection, infection, fusion, mutation, alteration and transformation.

Every portrait is a surfacing, a prominence, a pre-eminence, an emergence or emergency that breaches the margins of representation or the interfaces of a mirror. Portrayal is always for something. What is drawn always leaps ahead out of its ground, or it perforates a limit, or it peels off and impels something new: an experience, a perception, a performance, a scene, a seeing.