Artist Profiles

Artists

Our partner artists bring original works, personal stories, and distinct creative practices into the Chartreuse by Roje boutique.

Featured artist

1 artist

Featured artist

Steven Vasquez Lopez

Steven Vasquez Lopez is a San Francisco–based artist working across drawing, photography, sculpture, performance, and installation. Raised in Southern California in a Mexican-American household, his work explores how identity is constructed, performed, protected, and transformed through pattern, adornment, repetition, and ritual. In The Weight of Flowers, Lopez brings together two recurring forms: the ski mask and the flower. Both conceal and reveal. Both can seduce, protect, decorate, commemorate, and transform. A mask intended to obscure the wearer can make a body impossible to ignore; a flower, seemingly delicate and ornamental, can carry the weight of desire, celebration, grief, memory, and renewal. Through photography and sculptural floral forms, Lopez considers masculinity not as a fixed identity but as something performed individually and collectively. Masked figures gather, pose, feast, touch, admire, support, and play. Against raw and industrial spaces, color, flowers, pearls, costume, and excess create moments of theatricality and unexpected beauty. The individual remains distinct while becoming part of a larger arrangement. The Weight of Flowers lives within these contradictions: concealment and visibility, masculinity and femininity, humor and seriousness, beauty and impermanence, individuality and belonging. Rather than resolving them, Lopez allows them to coexist. Like flowers gathered together, their differences are what give the arrangement its form. At its core, the exhibition considers what we inherit, what we perform, what we protect, and what we choose to carry forward—and the possibility that becoming ourselves is not an act of perfection, but of transformation.

View artist

Other artists

3 artists

Antonio Roliz

Antonio Roliz is a visual artist who channels his emotions, memories, and life experiences into vibrant, expressive works of art. His paintings serve as living memories—much like photographs—capturing moments, feelings, and reflections from his personal journey. Rooted primarily in acrylic painting while remaining open to exploring new mediums and materials, his artistic practice is guided by a simple yet profound philosophy: “Always try to find the light in the corner of a dark box.” Antonio’s work is characterized by vibrant colors, expressive abstraction, and an unwavering search for optimism. His paintings often radiate energy, movement, and emotion, inviting viewers into a world where light persists despite darkness. While many are drawn to the brightness and beauty of the work, the deeper stories behind the paintings often reveal experiences of struggle, healing, loss, resilience, and personal transformation. Having faced many challenges and triumphs throughout his life, Antonio’s art serves as a deeply personal form of communication. As a child, he often felt unable to fully vocalize his emotions and experiences. As an adult, painting has become his voice—a visual language through which he expresses thoughts and feelings that words alone cannot capture. The creative process is both therapeutic and liberating, allowing him to release emotions and preserve moments that have shaped who he is. Constantly inspired by the world around him, his mind is always searching for life’s next lesson, experience, or revelation that may spark a future painting. Through his work, Antonio Roliz invites viewers to reflect on their own journeys, embrace both light and shadow, and recognize the beauty that can emerge from even the most challenging chapters of life.

View artist

René Espejo

René Espejo is a self-taught first-gen Afro-Indo-Caribbean artist, originally from New Jersey but now a longtime resident of San Francisco. René's artistic journey sprang from many different streams of interest: their love of reading their older brother's X-Men, Sonic the Hedgehog, DC comics. As well as RPG and JRPG fantasy video games, Japanese Anime and American Cartoons, Vanity Fair Magazines, and the hazy familial tales from their parents' home country of Jamaica. During their childhood, René was raised in a strict Pentecostal Christian home, and so art and storytelling were one of the few ways that they were able to escape. Despite being raised in a strict Christian home, René was also aware of the long line of Obeah practitioners that existed on their father's side of the family. Around the time when René discovered their identity as both a queer and agender person, they also rejected their childhood religion and came into their own spiritual identity as a witch. Their art is a celebration of many different worlds coming together to coexist and is also part of their spiritual practices. Through queer identity, witchcraft, fantasy, and Caribbean flair, their work examines many different topics. Through their work, they envision a world that celebrates “The Witch” and that makes space for those who are historically marginalized and vilified. The subjects of their work are almost exclusively queer and trans people of color, but through the lens of fantasy. These characters exist as a “reversed rejection” to a society that has rejected them. René hopes to continue to create a body of work that highlights the lives and experiences of queer and trans people of color, and that further reminds viewers that these stories, these stories can never truly be erased, regardless of what the world at large does. Like the witch who has been burned at the stake, our spirits and our stories will keep coming back and continue to live on for generations to come.

View artist

Renatto Guerrero

Renatto Guerrero is a self-taught Peruvian artist who relocated to the United States in 1999. Raised in a traditional Catholic and machista society, Renatto found in art a space for freedom, identity, and self-expression. From an early age, he was surrounded by stories shared by his grandmother, and those memories shaped his lifelong fascination with storytelling. Through painting, he discovered his own visual language for creating narratives, transforming personal experiences, imagination, emotions, and memories into vibrant worlds. His work explores the intersection of Catholic sacred stories, Greek mythology, fantasy, sensuality, personal experiences, and the emotional narratives found in the lyrics of songs that inspire him. Through cartoonized nude male figures, dramatic poses, expressive characters, and playful symbolism, Renatto reimagines religious and mythological imagery through his own perspective, creating a universe where spirituality, desire, humor, and identity coexist. Some works explore themes of intimacy, personal fetishes, and human connection, including his interest in foot fetish aesthetics, presented as part of a broader exploration of vulnerability, attraction, self-acceptance, and the freedom to embrace one’s own desires. Each character becomes a storyteller, carrying fragments of mythology, personal history, and emotion into a world where fantasy and reality meet.

View artist