Clare Rojas: Chicago Spotlight: Frieze New York 2020

In her newest body of paintings, Clare Rojas is working within the liminal space between abstraction and figuration, as visual stories unfold within quasi-illusional space. For Rojas, storytelling manifests in many different ways: sometimes visually, as a painting, drawing, or sculpture; or other times musically, as a song. Yet one similarity Rojas has noticed between these various forms of expression has to do with reduction. Her songwriting pares down the essence of a story to something that can be conveyed in minutes, just as the essence of form and line in her abstract visual compositions is reduced to an examination of the tension of balance.

However, though theoretically reductive, Rojas’ highly individualized visual language also represents an escalation. Each composition proliferates from a personal totemic form un-rooted to figurative meaning, but evocative of the shape of a drop of water or a mountain. The form has evolved over time, from an abstract shape that Rojas instinctively drew to something concrete she began noticing in her everyday visual environment. Says Rojas, “The more I drew it, and meditated on the shape, the more I saw it everywhere I looked. I found it in the figure, in nature, in water, in land, in animals.”