Roger Herman
Los Angeles Projects LLC, Los Angeles ARTnews, October 2000
Roger Herman has been acknowledged one of L.A.'s leading painters since the early 1980s, chiefly known for his often monumentally-scaled expressionistic canvases featuring the obsessively repeated images of such unemotional subjects as the side of an apartment building or a suite of office furniture. Their geometric construction has served as a rich rhythmic structural subtext for essentially painterly concerns.
Now Herman offers a suite of woodcut "prints" which remain close in spirit and appearance to his paintings, choosing as subject matter a military tank, a spray of flowers in a paint can, set on a tabletop with a Walkman tape player and a calculator (a gently ironic put-down of technology, perhaps, in this lo-tech medium), and the side of a ranch house. It's interesting to recall, in view of the artist's German heritage, that the Expressionists also found in woodcut a medium that responded to the raw physicality of their approach. Herman himself has worked in this medium before, producing a series of images that addressed some icons of the origins of "modern" art, including Van Gogh, and his famous chair and boots.
The current work differs partly in scale, partly in his refinement of the medium. The earlier series was also cut in large plywood sheets, but Herman has recently discovered more sophisticated tools, enabling him to counter the splintering effects of the material. Given the size of the sheets, he inks them on the floor, several colors at once for each of two printing stages, laying the paper over them and hand-pressing it with rough rubbing tools. The results are highly textured, physical and clearly painterly in intent. With two or three panels adjoined to form a single image, they're also able meet Herman's predilection for monumental scale: hung salon-style, they achieve their success in part through their sheer, brute power. While the tank is a perfect metaphor for their modus operandi, the bottom-line feeling is not threat, but rather a pulsating exuberance of color and form.
