Rebekah Rubalcava (b. 1996, La Jolla, California) is a self-taught oil painter currently based in Atlanta whose work explores the liminal territories of the subconscious, sensuality, and the unknown. Rooted in dream imagery and deeply personal symbolism, her paintings emerge from an interior landscape shaped by psychological transformation, intuition, and encounters with the unseen dimensions of the self.
Rubalcava's practice is driven by an interest in the shadow-those aspects of identity that exist beneath conscious awareness. Drawing from dreams, internal states, and archetypal forms, her work engages with the process of internal alchemy, where desire, fear, memory, and instinct collapse into potent visual symbols. These elements coalesce into surreal compositions that feel both intimate and otherworldly, inviting viewers into a charged psychological terrain where meaning is felt before it is understood.
Her paintings often inhabit a "burning dreamscape"-lush, visceral environments in which figures, symbols, and atmospheres blur the boundaries between self and other, body and psyche, presence and dissolution. Rather than offering fixed narratives, Rubalcava's work resists closure, encouraging open-ended interpretation and personal projection. In this way, the viewer becomes an active participant, confronting their own unconscious material while navigating the porous threshold between identity and the void.
Sensuality plays a central role in Rubalcava's visual language, not as spectacle, but as a conduit for vulnerability and transformation. Her figures and forms suggest intimacy, longing, and exposure, while simultaneously remaining elusive and untouchable. Beauty, in her work, is inseparable from danger and uncertainty-an invitation that carries risk. This tension allows her paintings to operate as psychological mirrors, reflecting both desire and discomfort.
Rubalcava's work also engages with broader questions of self-concept and reality, challenging the stability of external perception. By privileging intuition and symbolic logic over rational structure, her paintings suggest that identity is fluid, fractured, and continually in flux. Themes of individuation, dissolution, and rebirth recur throughout her practice, positioning the act of painting as both confrontation and release.
Through this process, Rubalcava frames art-making as a form of inner excavation-an act of witnessing the self in transformation. Her paintings serve as reminders of the inevitable changes we undergo in the pursuit of self-knowledge, urging viewers to look inward, confront their darkness, and recognize the generative potential of surrender.