Raphaëlle Goethals

Desert Nights, 2023, framed encaustic and oil on panel

2023

Focusing on painting as a space of exploration, Raphaëlle Goethals has worked with wax, resin, and pigments as her signature medium for over twenty years. She established her 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 layered encaustic and pigment abstractions comprised of multiple thin layers brushed, scraped, and burnished to a smooth and subtle finish. Her uniquely translucent surfaces exist at the intersection of the contemplative and the sensual. As a verbal and cultural surimposition, the discreet presence of the grid anchors us in the present time: an unapologetic nod to modernism and the vocabulary of painting, it coexists here with vast, glowing, luminous surfaces. 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. 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 came to the United States in 1981 to further her formal education at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA. 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, and Luxe magazine amongst others. She 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.