Raul Elizalde (b. 1958, Buenos Aires, Argentina) lives and works in Sarasota, Florida.
I am almost self-taught, except for technical drawing classes (as part of engineering school) in Buenos Aires, Argentina; drawing and painting classes at the New School for Social Research in New York City; and painting classes at New College of Florida, in Sarasota, Florida, USA. I do not hold an art degree. I am an independent artist based in Sarasota, Florida, and I work across painting, drawing and photography. My current practice emerges from five decades of visual work moving through figuration, abstraction and a return to figuration that now synthesizes those earlier disciplines into a layered visual language.
Above/Below
Every image contains more than one reality. One occupies the surface; others remain submerged—psychological, historical, imagined, or remembered. My work attempts to bring these realities into the same pictorial space without resolving them into a single narrative.
Working across painting, drawing, and photography, in my recent work I construct images that suggest psychological fracture: compositions in which apparent composure is already compromised from within, where the familiar quietly slips into something less certain. I work primarily in acrylic on canvas and synthetic paper, often beginning with archival photographs from the 1930s and 1940s in the public domain. Stripped of their original context, these fragments become raw material rather than historical documents. Through layering, erasure, repetition, and reconstruction, they lose their original identities and acquire new relationships that I could not have anticipated beforehand.
The image almost always arrives before its meaning. Rather than illustrating a predetermined idea, I work until the composition develops its own internal logic. Interpretation follows construction. As figures migrate between photographs and painted passages, between representation and abstraction, they begin to inhabit several realities at once. They may function simultaneously as witnesses, projections, memories, symbolic presences, or participants in the same event. I am interested in preserving those possibilities rather than choosing among them.
This layered construction reflects a broader understanding of human experience. We rarely encounter the world as a single, stable reality. Memory overlays perception, history inhabits the present, imagination reshapes recollection, and personal experience continually alters what we believe we see. My paintings seek to make that condition visible—not by illustrating psychological states, but by allowing them to coexist within the image.
The title Above/Below refers not only to physical layering but also to the relationship between what is immediately visible and the less accessible structures that shape it. Surface and depth, observation and projection, presence and absence remain in continuous dialogue. The paintings resist definitive interpretation because I believe meaning is not fixed within the image itself. It emerges through the encounter between the work and the viewer, whose own memories, expectations, and emotional associations complete the composition.
