that insolent wallowing

Terry Rodgers paints entrancing glimpses at raw hedonism — modern, American, urban, Grey’s-Anatomy diverse, indolent, excessive, impudent. Set in sumptuous, soap-operatic locales, youth and beauty are squandered in complex orgies of many bodies and many layers. Epicurean pigs, lotus eaters, Klimtian nymphs, frozen in their idle shuffle for our ogling. Though the paintings are in a way surprisingly chaste — nudes showing nothing that the Greeks didn’t sculpt — what both beguiles and offends is that insolent, apathic wallowing in excess — no one ever smiles, this isn’t about happiness, it’s about pleasure. (Via nudonation.)