Raphaelle Goethals in her Santa Fe studio.
Goethals’ paintings are meditative, carefully executed dream-scapes infused with barely perceptible geometric forms to ground the viewer’s eye. She begins her paintings with an ancient technique of applying pigmented wax to birch panel, creating a textured background for her work, “often in the color red, the color of our insides” the artist explains.
Focusing on painting as a space of exploration, Raphaëlle Goethals creates lyrical, multi layered painterly abstractions utilizing a highly refined mix of hot and cold encaustic technique uniquely her own. Over nearly three decades, she established her own vocabulary in the form of distinctive groups of paintings, which evolved concurrently. Place and process are integral to the works of the artist; who is known for her signature abstractions comprised of multiple thin layers brushed, scraped or burnished to a smooth and subtle finish. Her uniquely translucent surfaces exist at the intersection of the contemplative and the sensual.
Addressing our times, Goethals complex and meticulous mark making vibrates with a sense of rhythm and lyrical beauty offering viewers a range of psychological and aesthetic experiences. Embarking on a conceptually rigorous journey, yet trusting an intuitive sense of rightness and acknowledging the inescapable history of the medium, Goethals is interested in a blurring of boundaries. In opposition to the "tabula rasa” necessary to the early modernists, her practice is about integration and distillation, and reinvesting the constituents of Painting.
Drawing from minimalist practice, her obsessive mark making weaves complex surfaces building slowly over time, like strata on the earth surface. We connect to the layered content the same way we are confronted to a pulsating, interconnected, multi-layered world. Resisting classification yet surrendering to the emotional possibilities of color, the current body of works lures the viewer to reverie and reflection while whispering of powerful flows and movements, perhaps alluding to cosmic forces, ocean currents, population displacement, or tectonic shifts of all sorts.
The internalized landscape is reduced to its minimal resonance: the sound of the wind, the dust on a windshield, and the further abstracted notion of nature.
Born and raised in Brussels, Belgium, Raphaëlle Goethals earned her BFA at the Ecole Le 75 in Brussels, then came to the United States in 1981 to further her formal education at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Attracted to the vastness of the landscape and the quality of light, she relocated to New Mexico in 1994 where she developed her mature painting style. Throughout her career she has been featured in Art in America, Art News, the Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest, Glasstire, and Luxe magazine amongst others. She has been exhibiting her work since the mid nineties, and is represented in distinguished permanent collections in the United States and abroad, including the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the New Mexico Museum of Fine Art, the Boise Art Museum, the Grace Museum, as well as numerous corporate and private collections.