Jacobo roa
2025 POP UP
Jacobo Roa in the Angela King Gallery, New Orleans
Roa creates abstract work by way of realism; the emotional thing by means of intellectualism; spontaneity by way of strategy. Roa takes the artifacts from everyday culture and transforms them into extraordinary compositions.
Roa was born left-handed and when he was a little boy he would write everything in reverse. His teachers thought he had dyslexia, but in fact he learned to read and to draw at a very early age. A love for drawing persisted and the backward writing reappeared in his work in his early twenties. Roa plays with images and texts in reverse, creating encrypted messages.
The imagery in Roa’s work is a collection of messages, poems, letters; scientific formulas, magic recipes, classifications of ants, medicinal plants and herbs; addresses, numbers, cities, arrows, signs, compasses, names and places that inhabit his world; words in Spanish, Nahuatl, Maya, Latin, or English that have no absolute meaning but rather move and connect within his paintings, to be considered as part of a window to their worlds.