Focusing on painting as a space of exploration, Raphaëlle Goethals has used wax and resin as her signature medium for the past ten years. Probing the physicality of the materials, Goethals works in a process of layering, pouring, scraping off, scratching into the surface, effacing, all of this eliciting from the viewer a continuous shifting in the perception of forms, a build up and overlap of successive stages which demands that his or hers attention continually adjusts in order to consider the various perceptual possibilities within the subject. Goethals paintings examine the relationship between space and depth, presence and absence. Trusting an intuitive sense of rightness, and acknowledging the inescapable history of the medium, Goethals is interested in a blurring of boundaries.

Born in Belgium and partially raised in the South of France, Goethals moved to the United States in 1980 to study at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Drawn to the quality of light and the vastness of the landscape, she moved to New Mexico in 1993.