Circle of Infinite Chaos, 2022

In 2022, following the COVID-19 pandemic, painter Clare Rojas made a series of paintings about “the edge” of environmental collapse, of political disarray, and of the anxiety produced by both. This included Circle of Infinite Chaos, depicting a woman lying beneath a sphere with intersecting loops and floating objects. Perhaps it is a metaphor for synapses firing in Rojas’s brain as she tries to make sense of chaos? As she notes: “I think my work has always teetered between chaos and the opposite of chaos. Serenity, maybe…I’ve always been searching for that balance, and the magic is somewhere in the middle.”

Clare Rojas is known for paintings with idiosyncratic personal narratives and abstractions. After relocating to San Francisco, she became associated with the Mission School in the 1990s, which drew heavily from narrative and folk art forms. Her flat, geometric style often references a quest for harmony among universal elements and represents relationships between humans and nature. Many of her paintings are seen to reference cycles of life between birth, death, and re-birth.