The last time I visited Raquel in her studio, she was working on Forest of Words, a series of five large-scale, monochromatic paintings. Her airy, light-filled studio was stacked floor to ceiling with her life’s work. She remained focused, as always, on what turned out to be her ultimate series. Raquel’s sustained dedication to themes such as darkness, silence, invisibility, dreams, poetry, and all aspects of language, culminate in this body of work. Layer upon layer of oil paint and text creates a richly modeled surface while obscuring individual words, a metaphor for the ways in which meaning is often hidden behind language itself. Sketched out in pencil, lines of ghostly letters move across the center of the mostly black compositions and hover just beyond reach, beyond comprehension. Forest of Words is also the title Raquel gave to an artist’s book she created in the last months of her life. The book comprises a glossary of terms that were important to her work, each word accompanied by one of Raquel’s drawings and her own written definition. With her strong belief that language has the ability to transcend the words we see, she assigned meanings to various terms that are personal, symbolic, and often visual or emotional responses to the ideas embedded within each word. She defines the word Essence, for instance, as, “what remains when there is nothing left” and Burial is poetically described as, “the realm where the visible becomes invisible.”
—Mary-Kay Lombino
