Clare Rojas, Go Placidly (Exhibition View), via Andrew Kreps
In her work, artist Clare Rojas employs a deeply personal visual language as she moves freely between dense figurative scenes, and minimal, abstract compositions. Rojas approaches both with a consistent, lyrical sensitivity as she interjects totemic references to her own life, and the Northern Californian landscape that surrounds her studio, seeking to distill fleeting memories and experiences into concrete shapes. For her first exhibition with Andrew Kreps, Rojas continues these modes of practice.
Clare Rojas, Go Placidly (Exhibition View), via Andrew Kreps
Throughout her work, Rojas looks for new forms to communicate narrative, drawing on her interest in languages shared throughout the natural world, particularly that of birds that are capable of recognizing human faces through geometric forms. The resulting works are akin to a musical arrangement, mixing symbolic elements, formal decisions, as well as autobiographical allusions, and play on our instinctive desire to decode, and comprehend images. Here, shepresents a series of interconnected paintings that follow a central female figure, and her search for home. In The Sacred Bird Tree, she sits within a densely layered landscape, having found peace in the natural world. Functioning both as a remedy to her search and a rubric, the work represents a macro view of the subsequent paintings in the exhibition, which focus on the fleeting moments from life’s cycles – from sickness to health, entrapment to freedom, and birth and rebirth. Moving from interior scenes, to urban, and rural settings, each environment demonstrates its own challenges and dangers, from natural elements, to predators, and the accidental, suggesting the precarity of both our interior worlds, and the world we inhabit.
Clare Rojas, Go Placidly (Exhibition View), via Andrew Kreps
The artist works across a broad series of material and conceptual territories, ranging from geometric abstractions to placid seaside landscapes, and into strange, otherworldly creatures, rarely settling in one place for long, or dwelling on the nature of these shifts in a manner that emphasizes anything but the artist’s approach towards shared threads and graphical motifs. A sense of subtle longing, of melancholic stillness seems to pervade the works here, Rojas drawing together a range of disparate elements to examine and explore notions of self, home, and the imagined.
The show closes May 6th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Clare Rojas at Andrew Kreps [Exhibition Site]
