Rana Rochat: Works on Paper

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Rana Rochat, "Untitled NZ 254," 2017

encaustic on paper, 46" x 41"

Newzones is pleased to present "Works on Paper", a solo exhibition by Rana Rochat.

Rochat maintains that narratives sacrifice intuition, gut feelings, and the profound experience of mystery that a painting has the potential to provide. In her new series, the forms and marks, with their apparent weight, particular vitality, and inertia, live in a luminous and transparent environment. Their primary focus is on rhythm and cadence that she conveys through color, line, and forms. As such, they are purely expressive or lyrical, not narrative. Rochat's paintings are there to let the mind of viewers run free and float through colors and patterns, moods and emotions.

Working in the encaustic medium, Rana Rochat's paintings aim to capture the delicate balance between order and chaos, reason and spontaneity. These earthy paintings result from this search and take place within the richly layered encaustic surfaces of vividly colored wax and transparent layers. The sense of depth is built into her paintings through the gradual addition of forms and textures.

Swirls, lines, and drips are formed within the luminous layers of each painting. While appearing natural and familiar, they are at the same time non-specific, refusing to adhere to just a single meaning for viewers. The freedom in the shapes allows viewers to get lost in thought and generate their own meaning from the artwork. Her new series is moving toward an openness: letting color and space within the piece play a more prominent role in achieving a balanced yet lively environment coexisting with forms, line, and marks.

In these paintings, Rochat creates what she calls "an experience that is pre-verbal, promoting pictorial awareness prior to any explicit formatting of perceptual experiences into narratives" and refers to her own artwork as "visual poems".