Julian Rogers

Tyler Park Presents is pleased to present Julian Rogers’ solo exhibition Rest Is Easy. This is the Thailand-based artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery featuring all new paintings.

Julian Rogers’ practice engages still life and landscape as a means of exploring the optical and phenomenological possibilities of painting. Working with light and thin layers of oil, he develops images that feel at once precise and open-ended. His paintings construct vivid, often improbable spaces or environments that draw equally from observation and invention, and that move between the familiar and the strange. Working with the image of the clouds in Rest Is Easy, Rogers begins with something recognizable but unstable. In painting them, he alters their conditions entirely: clouds that once drifted freely are fixed, formalized, subjected to unnatural color, and suspended in impossible spaces. They lose their autonomy, but in that loss, what remains is a constructed visual experience. One that, like abstraction, exists to be understood with the eyes rather than resolved through narrative.

Across the exhibition, representations move between legible forms and their fragmented counterparts such as textures, outlines, and distortions that only partially cohere. In the more abstract passages, loose associations begin to surface with unfamiliar terrains, altered states, environmental residue, painterly histories, even literary echoes like White Noise and its “toxic airborne event” of Don DeLillo's 1985 novel. Meanwhile, the more conventionally rendered skies subtly undermine expectations of space and light. They abandon a consistent source of illumination, instead adopting a compositional logic that feels at once ordered and disjunctive akin to collage, where elements both recede and flatten, cohere and clash. Natural color appears in one moment and dissolves in the next. Depth is suggested, then denied. The result is not quite another world, but something closer to the atmosphere of one with a groundless expanse where change is both imperceptibly slow and overwhelmingly vast. A place where landscapes drift without anchor, and where, in some distant and ungraspable sense, storms might rage for millennia, raining diamonds from the sky.

Julian Rogers (b. 1981) is an American artist living and working in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He holds an MFA from the University of California, San Diego (2015) and a BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2007). His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions domestically and internationally at venues such as Tyler Park Presents, Los Angeles; Acme, Los Angeles; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; Zone Gallery, Osaka; Universidad del País Vasco; Biblio; and the UCLA Wight Gallery, Los Angeles. His work has held solo exhibitions previously at venues such as Red Arrow Gallery, Nashville; Ditch Projects, Eugene; Acme, Los Angeles; and Helmuth Projects, San Diego. His work has been written about in publications such as ArtForum, Artsy Editorial, and Carla. His work is included in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary, San Diego.