Complexity in Search of Serenity: The Holocaust and Other Paintings of Alain Rogier

by Constance Mallinson

Perhaps the most misunderstood reflection on the Holocaust was made by philosopher Theodor Adorno when he proclaimed “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”  Responding to his critics who believed he wished to suppress all art, he later reconsidered, paraphrasing the great German philosopher Hegel and clarifiying that as long as there is an awareness of human suffering, there must be art as an objective form of that awareness.  As an antidote to the hollowness in many aspects of mass culture, Adorno thought Modern art, with its history of countering complacent bourgeois values, was the only creditable form by which to express the deepest emotional responses to life. However one interprets Adorno’s words —whether one hears that no words can ever justly memorialize the victims of the Holocaust or that rarified aesthetic arguments were banal after such horrors---- art will always have the ability to exemplify the fundamental dialectic between humanistic principles and the basest inhumanities. The recent figurative and abstract paintings of Alain Rogier embody this opposition through a deep belief in aesthetic effects, most notably for prompting a dialogue between the corporeal and theological.  

Rogier, the son of Auschwitz survivors, has chosen abstract painting as the language most suited to express the complicated emotions arising from the perspective of life passed on to him by parents who experienced the Holocaust. He states  “…the experience so permeated their values, their approach to life, their belief system, their integrity, that every ounce of their soul and character communicated the gruesomeness and depth of its life changing effect.”

Painting as the means of exploring inner conflict was a hallmark of Abstract Expressionism, the painting approach most closely identified with Pollock, DeKooning, and Kline in the 1950’s.  Abstract Expressionism was part of a long lineage of Modernist avant-garde transgressive strategies that alienated entrenched cultural views with challenging aesthetics and shocking subject matter. It was characterized by the elevation of agitated gesture, evocative, moody color, large scale, and the conveyance of interior psychological states in lieu of more literal, “realistic” representations. Now expressionistic painting is understood as part of a larger trajectory or continuum, an unexhausted unfinished project expanding beyond the mythic, grand narratives of progress upon which it was initially predicated.  For contemporary artists like Rogier, it is the most appropriate formal means for communicating difficult or tragic content: the weighted and rapidly applied brushstroke and evocative color combinations transmit complex feelings and emotions; unexpected juxtapositions of universal forms and the ambiguous spatial contingencies foment tensions and debate.  Critic and art historian Donald Kuspit has ascribed the term “The Expressive Cure” to both early 20th century expressionism and to its current forms for its power to express the most profound and supersensuous subtleties of emotion. Expressionism, according to Kuspit, wards off a sense of annihilation in the artist and viewer to keep renewing and regenerating art itself into the future.

Rogier’s Holocaust paintings consist of a series of painted and collaged “landscapes”, and a distinctly abstract series with little recognizable imagery. Rogier has acknowledged Anselm Kiefer’s darkly emotional works full of references to Nazi symbology, mythology and German history as an inspiration. Kiefer sought to force a full recognition of Germany’s war time guilt through a revival of early 20th Century German Expressionism. Kiefer’s use of photo collage and thickly applied paint often mimicked scorched earth and blood itself; the rawness signified the emergence of suppressed feelings and was meant to  incite a critique—and healing process—concerning the period.  Rogier’s paintings capture the victim’s perspective to create landscapes of memory in which black and white reprints of Holocaust photographs intermingle with vibrant or turgid passages of paint. The photographs are specifically chosen, not for their grisly aspects, but for their ironic juxtapositions and illustrations of the human  willingness to disregard cruelty. Rogier has us confront lines of forced marches to the death camps next to officers and prison guards laughing and celebrating, heightening the perceptions with suggestive colors.  In these hybrids of figuration and abstraction, impastoed naturalistic browns and earthy greens surround pods containing the faded photographs as if cross sections of tombs or areas of the brain seared with images. Horizontal divisions in several paintings appear to delineate heaven and earth and become pictorial devices for promoting a dialogue or search for metaphorical congruence between “two spheres of existence.” Like Kiefer, Rogier provides ample imagery to confront brutality and contemplate such suffering.  Chimneys reach to the skies bellowing black smoke, flames and ash; railroad tracks lead in and out of structures to recall the delivery of victims to the camps, but also double as symbolic ladders connecting earthbound horrors with freedom and spiritual release.  In still others we see childlike stick figures seeming to flee crude renderings of buildings-- a portrayal of the divide that exists between the first and second generations of survivors so crucial to understanding Rogier’s Holocaust works. Throughout, Rogier promotes meditation on choices about existence, often by inquiring of painting itself if it is the proper vehicle for conveying such pain. To keep us in the question, he refers to the seductive palette of Marc Chagall’s whose polychromed canvases provided a dreamy imaginative space in contrast to the hardships endured by Jews in the 20th century.

While not as specific in their visualizations as the landscapes incorporating historical documentation, Rogier’s abstract paintings are a no less compelling expression of the savagery of the Holocaust. They require sustained viewing and a commitment to continuously struggle with their philosophical, psychological and moral uncertainties.   As Anthony Julius has written of art and the Holocaust: “ It must give witness to the inadequacy of images, and therefore its own inadequacy to retrieve the meaning of the lives that were extinguished…..It must reject as bogus all claims to redemptiveness made on art’s behalf and by art itself, because they cannot survive the Holocaust’s de-sanctification of humanity.”  In Rogier, ambiguity and dissonance cannot redeem, but instead provoke interrogation. For what are we to make of Rogier’s use of calligraphic black shapes reminiscent of charred bones, Hebrew letters, gesticulating figures, raised weapons set within apocalyptic or nighttime skies? We can see wild orgiastic dances, warring throngs, or ghostly crowds surging towards their doom. Does a bright yellow rectangle in the center of smoky greyish black field represent a view from inside/outside the crematorium oven or through the slats of a suffocating railway car? Do we infer death, hope, liberation, or a mystical focal point from this seemingly simple gestalt? Geometric shapes, the trademarks of modernist abstraction, can be read as homages to Modernism’s aesthetic triumphs, but can also be associated with the ways in which modern technology assists evil. We can conjure up boxcars for quickly transporting prisoners, work cubicles that dehumanize labor, prison cells, standardized housing, bureaucracy’s efficient compartmentalization of horrific crimes. Circles can represent infinity but passionately rendered in evocative colors can be gaping, screaming orifices, unwinding spools of bloody barbed wire, or holes of hope for a transcendent future.  Past and present are simultaneously in play. Personal inner conflict is as much in evidence as epic nightmarish catastrophic scenarios, both indicated by the turbulent brushwork and allusive color.  Rogier’s paintings resist easy interpretations, asking that we embrace paradox and refuse simplistic, totalizing narratives or answers in our ongoing contest with intolerance, injustice and inhumanity.  It is a poetry that Adorno would have understood.