Roy Tamboli is a descendent of Italian immigrants who settled in the Mississippi Delta at the turn of the century. He engaged with spirituality and mysticism at a young age through the traditional Latin Catholic Church and contact with the African American gospel culture o Memphis, Tennessee where he was raised.

Embedded with personal stories and transformative rituals, his paintings are a respite from the complexities of our world and from the violent southern city he lives in. He often begins paintings in remote places around the world on repurposed cotton bed sheets. These powerful surfaces inspire me as testimony to the reality of other people’s lives, thinking about their laughter, readings, love and tears. After working on them outside he returns them to his studio where they are glued onto panels for more work. Fusing diverse locations into a single work gives them an unpredictable and joyful character. Using masking techniques, developed from his sculpture work, the paintings evolve into multi-state themes that mimic contemporary, aggregated consciousness. Each new work is an equation asking to be solved and methodically, over time, it is. Using original processes to move beyond simple abstraction, they become a running journal of his time on what he calls “the human shift.”

“I create very original, energetic, abstract work unlike that of any other artist that I am aware of. Although it’s usually not too obvious, my paintings are heavily influenced by our inescapable and growing contact with extraterrestrial life forms. Credible evidence is being revealed, almost on a daily basis, confirming the existence of non-human entities on earth. This new reality is making right now the most exciting time in the history of the world.”