In Ethereal Paintings, Calida Rawles Plunges into the Dark Depths of Water — Colossal

In This Time Before Tomorrow, Calida Rawles diverges from the familiar faces—those of her daughters and chosen companions—that characterized her most recent body of work. Instead, the artist returns to rippling abstractions and bubbling textures, obscuring identifiable features with painterly gestures.

Water, for Rawles, is never neutral. In the lineage of scholars like Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, the artist considers water to be a charged site and vessel for memory. Along with references to texts by Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, and Albert Camus, among others, she presents this philosophical grounding as a way to consider the inevitability of change and how transformation can inspire hope. “What is the artist’s role in moments of crisis?” she asks.

Mixing her hyperrealistic style with surreal distortions, Rawles always begins with a photo session before turning to the canvas. In this stage, she conjures moments of ambiguity. Glimmering undulations and bubbles cloud the figures’ bodies, while the reflective surface creates the illusion of a double and two forms bleeding into one another. Whether barely breaching the water’s surface or plunging into a pool, the figures appear suspended in a brief moment, their liquid surroundings embracing their relaxed limbs.

Rawles gravitates toward chiaroscuro in these paintings, rendering deep, murky waters in bold acrylic. This dark color palette is also a metaphor for the current moment. She says:

Personally, I’m grappling with the fractures within the American mythos—once rooted in the promises of democracy, inclusion, and justice. Today, that dream feels increasingly elusive. The melting pot that was once a symbol of unity now cracks under the weight of deportations; truth has become subjective; and justice feels subverted. Amidst this cultural disorientation, I find myself untethered—aware of tectonic shifts beneath both my personal and collective foundations.

This Time Before Tomorrow is on view through September 27 at Lehmann Maupin London.