Greg Bogin "I want to be your friend" (2009) at Leo Koenig, Inc.
Greg Bogin’s “I Want to Be Your Friend” at Leo Koenig, which opened last week, is a delightful retreat. The work is fresh from the studio – made over the last four anxiety-ridden months. In an artist statement, Bogin says, “The concern I felt created the necessity to find a ‘happy place’ where I could escape to.” And with Bogin’s new set of work, viewers are invited to find an escape as well.
Bogin used abnormally shaped canvas, mostly covered in a stark, shiny, white paint. He then outlined the white shape with nearly-neon, acrylic paint in gradients and rainbows. Some look like cartoon bubbles, suggesting a place to insert your own text. And with a gradient outline of bright colors only a happy thought will do. Other works appear to be an upside down rainbow. Maybe the glass is half-empty, maybe our world has turned upside down, but their are still some rainbows to project our feelings underneath (or above in this case). Bogin dares us, if you can excuse the pun, to look somewhere over an inverted rainbow.
In his artist statement, Bogin says “painting is a visual language and as such words do a poor job of translation, trying to understand what a painting means…gets in the way of understanding the meaning of the painting.” This isn’t your classic Warholian attempt to skirt the issue. Bogin is instead, earnestly asking viewers to interpret his work for their own use. Quite literally he is calling on them to project their own musings, thoughts, anxieties or impressions onto those shiny white spaces, above or inside, not a silver lining, but a rainbow. Early this year, the artist set out to find his happy place in these works. Now, he’s asking you to find yours within them.
