Davidson Contemporary presents La patria, Foreign Intimacies, an exhibition of new paintings by Mel Rosas. Rife with magical realist and Surrealist imagery, this show – Rosas’s eighth with the gallery – delves further into the half-imagined reality that permeates all of Rosas’s work.

Rosas presents his work as entirely intimate, drawing from his own personal experience, dreams, and writings to create scenes from a Latin America that may or may not exist in reality, but lives in a collective and assumed consciousness. Streets never walked and courtyards never visited are eerily familiar as the artist thrusts objects in the foreground, pulling the viewer into a not altogether unthreatening environment whose only exits appear to be foreboding or unpredictable.

Boats remain moored but unmanned. Houses stand whole but covered with graffiti and peeling paint. A lone panther stalks the jungle’s edge, too close to civilization for comfort. The sole sign of humanity is a policeman dressed in paramilitary gear. The exhibition title refers to those quiet moments one has when traveling in a new place that border on familiarity and isolation. It also uses the term for homeland in a language that is natural for Rosas, but still his second tongue. Even when you know what is being said, you do not always know what is meant.