Miami-based artist Natalie Valencia creates paintings that emerge from sensation, where memory, identity, and lived experience are expressed through color and movement. Guided by intuition, her work draws from fragments that surface in moments of reflection, travel, and solitude, with the figure appearing through gestural markings inspired by her practice of drawing from life during residencies abroad and moments of intimate observation.
Valencia approaches painting through material experience. Layering oil paint to move between transparency and density, she builds surfaces that feel both revealed and concealed, mirroring the fluid spaces between memory and imagination. Texture becomes its own language sometimes soft and atmospheric other times raw and impasto holding the tension between the known and the ambiguous.
Her current series follows a process where color arrives before language, and with it, a quiet shift in gesture, often born from lived experience.
Valencia sees abstraction as a form of resistance and return. Through repetition, layering, and meditative brushwork, she creates paintings that oscillate between presence and absence, inviting viewers into a space of stillness and interiority.
