Cécile Roberfroid

Collective Z presents Carried, Not Told, a solo exhibition of sixteen paintings by Cécile Roberfroid. It is Roberfroid's first exhibition with Collective Z.

“What do we carry without ever saying it out loud?” The question sits at the center of Roberfroid's practice, and the exhibition takes its title from her answer to it. These are paintings about what goes unspoken — memory, belonging, the recognition of oneself in an experience — held rather than declared.

The show divides almost evenly between abstraction and the hidden figures, and both walls run the same arc. Each opens with a large abstraction — Confluence on the upper run, Holding The Space on the lower — and resolves at the right into bodies: two reclining sleepers, a painted hand, figures holding one another. The upper run ends in gold and olive; the lower closes on the grisaille pendants Inside Out and Outside In, hung side by side. Abstraction resolving into the figure is the movement of the entire exhibition.

Her titles gather into three vocabularies that map the work as clearly as any wall text — passage (Confluence, Detour To Home), holding (Hush & Hold, Fragments Of Us), and concealment (Beneath the Surface, Muted Whispers). The pendants name the mechanism underneath all three: interior states pushed outward into color, color resolving back into bodies.

“Cécile paints the part of an experience that never gets said out loud, and she does it without raising her voice,” says Alex Z. Wang, Founder and Director of Collective Z. “Walk either wall and you watch pure color turn into a person. That is the whole show.”

Cécile Roberfroid is a painter based in Rye, New York. She trained in fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York, then studied psychology and practiced as an art therapist — a background that runs through work built on what people carry and do not say. She has worked in fiber, photography, and ceramics, but returns to oil paint. Her recent exhibitions include a solo show at Geary Gallery in Darien, Connecticut, and presentations with ArtsWestchester, the Rye Arts Center, Arbor Gallery, and Blue Door Art Center. Works on paper by Roberfroid also appear in the Camp Z print rack at Affordable Art Fair NYC, September 16–20, 2026.