MEMBER FEATURE:

Our monthly Member Feature aims to showcase the talent that occupies our buildings and celebrate their work.

This month, we are excited to feature Rockella Space Member Gisela A. Lazarte, an abstract painter with a studio at One Eyed Studios whose work explores emotion, memory, movement, and vulnerability through layered fields of color and gestural form. Born in Caracas, Venezuela to Peruvian immigrant parents, and now based in New York City, Lazarte’s practice is shaped by a life lived across cultures, languages, and disciplines, drawing equally from personal sensation, cinematic atmosphere, and intuitive experimentation.

Before fully dedicating herself to painting, Gisela worked in film and audiovisual communication, later studying film directing in Barcelona and New York. Though she eventually returned to painting as her primary mode of expression, traces of her cinematic background remain embedded in the work. Her paintings unfold like emotional landscapes or fragments of memory, where rhythm, pacing, and atmosphere take precedence over narrative clarity.

Working primarily with diluted acrylic on raw canvas, Lazarte embraces a process rooted in both intention and surrender. Pigment stains, spreads, and settles unpredictably across the surface, creating compositions that emerge through accumulation rather than control. Organic forms drift in and out of focus, appearing suspended between construction and dissolution, while her titles offer poetic entry points into emotional states that resist direct representation.

Her recent solo exhibition, Come What May, A Flor De Piel, expands on these ideas through a body of work rooted in Spring as a metaphor for renewal, fragility, and emotional openness. Rather than depicting nature literally, the paintings channel the instability and vulnerability that accompany transformation, holding tension between delicacy and persistence.

At the core of Lazarte’s practice is a belief in abstraction as a space for shared human connection, one capable of moving beyond language and cultural boundaries. Through layered color, movement, and intuitive mark-making, her work invites viewers into a contemplative encounter with their own emotional landscapes.

To learn more about the creatives who call Rockella Space home, head over to the People page for a full list of in-depth interviews.

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Gisela A. Lazarte, I’m an artist focused on abstract painting. I was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela and have been based in NYC for almost 10 years.

I started painting when I was really young, taking some oil training lessons in my teenage years. At the time I worked on a lot of landscape and still nature in class, and was really into developing my representational and realistic drawing skills. At some point I started experimenting with a more surrealist approach, but this was around the time of college prep and, while I considered going to art school, I didn’t think this was a realistic career choice at the time. My parents are Peruvian and so I grew up in an immigrant household where the importance of being smart and practical about these choices was instilled in me since I was very little.

I decided to study Communication and figure out a specialization with a creative outlet along the way. Somewhere down the path I fell in love with filmmaking. Movies were, to quote David Lynch, “moving paintings with sound” and so I graduated with a concentration in audiovisual arts. I worked in film and video production for several years in Caracas and, while I enjoyed my work there and learned a lot, I wanted to pursue a more creative path. In tandem with the critical situation the country was facing, I moved to Barcelona, Spain in 2014 to study film directing. Here I started realizing that my interest always pulled to the more metaphorical, open to interpretation type of creation. It wasn’t however until I was already in NYC, many years later, that I started exploring abstract art. While I had continued drawing and sketching on the side, a big life crisis urged me to return to painting and express through open form and color, rather than try to depict. And in 2021, after all those twists and turns, it finally hit me that I needed to see through this pull to pursue a career in the arts. I haven’t looked back since.

How long have you been at Rockella Space, and what do you value most about having a studio at One Eyed Studios—particularly in terms of community and connection with other artists in the building?

I just moved to Rockella Space at the end of last year. I fell in love with my studio in particular but also with the creative energy in the building. Before, I was working out of a room in my apartment that I share with my husband and our cat. This is the first time I have a separate space for my practice, and while it has represented a significant adjustment in routine, it has had a tremendously positive impact on my work. I’m able to work on several more paintings at a time and streamline the many tasks other than painting. It has allowed me to develop my work further already in a much more consistent way, and while it was great being able to just jump in and out of work having my mini studio where I also lived, I think the separation and being able to remove myself daily from the work allows a much necessary and beneficial breathing room.

Tell us about your work. What inspires you?

My work is purely abstract and it focuses on expressing feeling and movement through layers of color, organic shapes and rhythmic marks. I’m deeply moved by a need to release from my internal world and am highly influenced and inspired by my surroundings. It’s a blend between memory, emotion, and sensory stimulus that I try to imprint over raw canvas via my hands, often my whole body, and the materials.

Your paintings often resist fixed imagery, yet the titles feel emotionally precise and suggestive. At what point in the process does a title emerge, and how important is it in shaping the viewer’s reading of the work?

The titles come from entries in my written journal or are borrowed from songs I am listening to at some point in the process of a piece, usually the first session. Sometimes a title comes to mind while painting, but most of the time I try to keep my mind free from new thoughts. Later, once the work is finished or almost finished, I revisit notes and journals alongside the music I was listening to. I like the titles to be suggestive as you say, same as the works might be, while leaving plenty of room for your own interpretation. I think it helps the viewer’s path in reading the work while leaving enough room for individual experience, which is what I’m most interested in, not to dictate a set message.

I will often title a painting in both English and Spanish, which is my mother tongue. In my latest body of work and exhibition, “come what may, a flor de piel”, titles are composed of two parts, one in each language, where each part is not a translation of the other. They complement each other. I think my work lives somewhere in the intersection of the two, between two worlds or in their collision, as do I. With this being my debut solo show, it was important for me to have both languages, each holding their own, and each supporting the other to create the whole. There’s also a series of six small paintings within the body of work, where the titles have one or the other language, but it’s an equal split between the six.

You describe painting as a kind of “meditation-in-action.” What does that state actually look or feel like in the studio, and how do you know when a painting has reached resolution?

I strive to be fully present during the process, which often calls for and leads to quieting my mind. I have a few studio rituals that help with this, like burning palo santo, stretching and dancing to get into my body. Music plays a big role in my process, I use it to channel feeling. I’ll pick the music depending on the mood I’m in or want to let out that day, and start to work.

As the process develops, I get into the so-called “flow state”, where I’m fully submerged in that moment and everyday thoughts and worries quiet down. So intention is set at the beginning of each session but intuition takes place once the painting begins. With time, intuition also starts being informed by experience, and you learn to intuitively gauge better when to pause, when to keep pushing and when to fully stop.

Once everything has fully dried the next day, or a couple days later depending on the season, then there’s a more logical part of the process that comes in, analyzing what’s happening on the canvas first from a purely painterly lens – composition, depth, rhythm, balance. And then also if a feeling has been captured in abstract form, if it’s telling me something even if I can’t yet explain in words what that something is. I’ll work a bit more on a piece after that with this mindset from thereon, usually just for final details or to emphasize a moment, but sometimes they need more work and several sessions. The bones of the piece have to be there from the first session though, if the subsequent layers fully change the work then I rather fully start a new one.

There seems to be an ongoing tension in your work between control and surrender, especially in the way diluted pigments spread and stain raw canvas. What draws you to processes that allow for unpredictability?

Life is full of unpredictability but this is something that I struggle with in everyday life. Sometimes it feels like I’m training myself in this regard in the studio all the time. Because, despite the fluid nature of my work, with time you learn to control it to an extent, and develop techniques that inform intuition, as I was saying before, to be able to better determine what layers and marks will look like when what needs to soak soaks, and what needs to remain on the surface dries. That’s just part of developing consistency and a visual language.

But it’s not an exact science and you have to be patient between layers and learn when to stop and wait. It’s easy to forget, especially when against a deadline, and everytime I do and try to fully force the outcome, those pieces never work out and don’t see the light of day. I used to see that as a waste (of time, materials) but now I always remind myself that it’s all part of the process. Time and time again, it reminds me that there has to be a balance between intention and intuition. That the tension between control and release is where the work happens.

And there’s something very freeing about constantly dancing with that unpredictable nature of the process that keeps me coming back to it, time and time again.

Having worked in film and audiovisual communication before fully committing to painting, do you think cinematically when composing a work? Are there aspects of editing, pacing, or atmosphere from filmmaking that still inform your paintings?

Yes, absolutely. My background in film and audiovisual communication is there in the pool that I draw from subconsciously. And then, on that more conscious stage of the process I was describing before, I’m always looking for a cinematic feeling in the work, a sense that there is something happening there actively on the canvas, like you caught a random photogram of a film constructed purely of colorful marks and colliding fields.

A recurrent motif in my work is exposed canvas as a negative space that creates another layer of depth, as it’s usually not confined to the borders of the canvas but become focal points surrounded by washes and color. It’s as if there’s another world behind that is peaking through, or you’re peaking into. I think it adds to the cinematic feeling or experience of it all.

Your paintings emphasize movement and rhythm without depicting recognizable subjects. How do you approach creating a sense of motion or emotional tempo through abstraction alone?

The “easiest” and most immediately satisfying way of conveying movement and rhythm is through gestural mark-making with oil sticks or pastels, color pencils, or pure paint brushstrokes on the raw canvas. Sometimes I start with these types of layers to loosen up and already set a first vivid impression on the piece.

The hardest way is through the blends and bleeds between layers of acrylic diluted with water. It’s the hardest to control and keep imprinted mid-motion, but that’s where letting go of control kicks in. I set these collisions in motion and then trust both in letting them evolve, observing along the way, sometimes responding, sometimes just waiting and letting it do its thing.

In your recent solo exhibition, come what may, a flor de piel that is on exhibit at Nassau Avenue Gallery until June 28th, 2026,  you connect Spring with vulnerability and renewal. Was this body of work shaped by a particular personal transition or emotional state?

Every year I go through seasonal depression in fall and winter. I used to think it would get better with time, the longer I lived here, but it almost seems harder each year. The state of the world definitely makes it harder as well. Spring-summer weather is year round where I grew up, but I’ve been learning with time that this is a pretty common experience, even for those who grew up in these latitudes. NYC is pretty brutal in winter and so it started to make sense to me that every year, when that first random warm day of the year takes place, there’s a big palpable energy shift in the atmosphere of the city, it feels like everyone is outside and we all tacitly commune in this collective feeling of making it through.

I started this body of work in that threshold between winter and spring, where the weather is all over the place but trees have yet to bud out. I was feeling both a renewal of hope and a sense of desperation for it to happen already. As I worked almost as if summoning spring through color, the phrase “come what may” kept popping on my mind. I started thinking about the way nature goes through this process year after year, slow but steady. But as life comes back, its primitive form is always its most vulnerable, conditions are uncertain, and yet it’s often its most beautiful expression. I realized this is also what I try to do with my work, in a process that constantly dances with unpredictability, in a career full of uncertainty, always remaining open and vulnerable in said process. Just like the first tiny sprouts and blooms are exposed to the elements and other influences out of its control in its emergence, my feelings are always exposed to the world on the canvas. And that’s where “a flor de piel” came into play, which literally translates to “at the flower of the skin” but it means something on the surface, usually used for feelings, a sensitive state.

You’ve spoken about abstraction as something that can transcend language and cultural barriers. As someone born in Venezuela to Peruvian parents and now living in New York, how have ideas around identity and belonging filtered into the work, even indirectly?

As my work is very personal in nature, it serves as a sort of visual journal for me. I process a lot of these questions through the interaction with the materials, through color and loose form. Growing up in an immigrant family also meant having these questions about identity and belonging at the forefront from early on. Now, as an immigrant myself, they have only expanded. They are present with me at every session, in the subtext of pretty much every body of work. Sometimes they peek through the titles.

Many of your paintings feel atmospheric, almost like fragments of memory or sensation rather than images. Are you drawing from specific lived experiences, or are you more interested in creating open emotional spaces for viewers to inhabit?

I like the way you put that. I’m more interested in creating emotional open spaces for viewers to inhabit, definitely. At the same time, I am drawing from lived experiences. Sometimes they seep through in a more conscious way when I’m painting, like a flashback, but what I draw from it is always the feeling of it all, not the specific visuals or imagery from it. I let all the memories from my past experiences inform my work from a more subconscious place – all the colors, landscapes, scents, sounds, stories are in the fabric that shapes me as a whole rather than being intentionally dissected or selected from.

There’s a softness and delicacy in your palette and mark-making, but also moments of tension and insistence. How conscious are you of balancing those opposing energies within a painting?

I do set the intention of having a balance between both every time I paint, mostly because I’m always interested in the tension between polar or contrasting forces in everything, especially in art: light and dark, chaos and order, softness and intensity, stillness and motion. When a painting feels too purely soft or ethereal, I like to disrupt it with strong gestural, almost visceral marks or even a peek of an unexpected color. I’m usually not thinking too much about these decisions, sometimes if I do think too much about it it feels like the wrong move when there’s a sense of serenity in the piece that is calming, but it’s what I gravitate towards. I guess it feels more honest to me.

For “come what may, a flor de piel”, I wanted each piece to carry this tension almost as if each was a response to the next one. The intention was for the works to feel very lively while embodying natural earthy greens and pastel colors both in light and dark hues. To have moments of serene color fields disrupted by thick brush strokes or bursting blooms, and yet feel a sense of harmony in the tension of it all. A little bit like nature does.

Because your work avoids clear representation, viewers inevitably project their own meanings onto it. Have there been interpretations of your paintings that surprised you or revealed something back to you about the work itself?

Yes, to me that’s part of what I love about it. It’s always interesting to learn how people interpret the work and there’s often been perspectives I hadn’t considered that do reveal something to me, and that’s wonderful. I don’t feel a need to control how people interpret the work, but if anything, I’d say that people will often tend to try to see recognizable forms, say, faces or animals or types of landscapes. I think it’s what our brains are wired to do, but I always try to bring it back to the abstract sphere: how does it make you feel? Maybe there’s no words yet to talk about that, but if you sit with it for a while, just let yourself experience it rather than trying to decode it, I think something happens there.

If you were to invite anyone alive or dead to a dinner party, who would be on your guest list?

Off the top of my head: Patti Smith, David Lynch, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Sam Gilliam, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Conny Méndez.

What advice would you give to artists with similar backgrounds to yours who are thinking about moving to New York City and pursuing a life in the art world?

If you’re still figuring out your voice, explore all the mediums, styles, techniques you can, follow your curiosity and keep it active – and hold on to your day job in the meantime. Being an artist in NYC gets so romanticized, but it’s truly rough. The city will test you over and over again. Double times, if you follow this path. Even if you’ve already found your voice, keep developing it in tandem with said job or jobs until you’re getting more work as an artist than said job. And even then, know that nothing is a given and this path is full of ups and downs, and uncertainty. So you have to be fully committed and always remember why you’re doing it, what drives you regardless of what happens, career-wise. NYC is full of opportunities and a beautiful energy that can be both inspiring and invigorating, as well as distracting and even overwhelming. Learn to find a balance between your practice and getting your cup full outside of it to keep returning to your practice.

What projects/exhibitions have you got coming up?

Nothing I can share just yet, but my exhibition “come what may, a flor de piel” is on view at Nassau Avenue Gallery through June 28.

Where can people see your work in IRL or online, and how can people contact you for a studio visit and/or therapy session?

email: hello@galazarte.com

Instagram: @az__arte

Website: galazarte.com