It gives us great pleasure to announce that Venezuelan-born painter Roxa Smith has joined the growing roster of artists here at C24 Gallery. Smith’s journey from South America has taken her through years as a California-based landscape painter to New York City, inspiring her more recent focus on interiors that often lead the eye to outward views. Sharpened by the last couple of years of pandemic-related isolation, she channels her memories, observations and sensibilities related to history, access, luxury, class, safety, freedom and nature into colorful renderings of living spaces that operate on multiple levels.
From a personal standpoint, as a Latinx gay woman, Smith embodies an existence that is lowkey, yet nevertheless outside the cultural mainstream. Her perspective is filtered through her renderings of the decorative patterns, furnishings and views from inside places that represent her honor of family and history, and the love she feels for home and culture. Her work explores the paradox of belonging and not belonging, the layers of identity bridging her southern and northern dual heritage, and the sense of isolation she has sometimes experienced, magnified in recent times by the pandemic lockdown.
Roxa Smith
