Clare Rojas Observes the World and Tells Us to “Go Placidly”

In her work, 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. 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.

For her first exhibition with the gallery, Rojas presents 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.