Rafael Delacruz

Kindly donated by Rafael Delacruz and Mitchell- Innes & Nash

Rafael Delacruz (b. 1989, San Francisco, CA, lives and works in Berkeley, CA and New York). Rafael Delacruz’s canvases feature vignettes of everyday life overlaid with diaphanous blocks of color. A self-taught painter, Delacruz’s practice begins with the act of drawing distinct forms and motifs. A car, a shopping cart, a bird or a clothed leg slide smoothly from cartoonish figuration into dream-like abstraction. Carefully considered surfaces alternately reveal and conceal narrative elements- such as a small sedan- images which carry significant personal meaning for the artist. Forms are layered over one another, obscuring legibility and instilling a spiritual, totemic quality to quotidian objects.

Employing a wide range of techniques from charcoal drawing to oil and acrylic paint and silkscreens of digitally distorted images, Delacruz does not follow a hierarchy of materials or painting’s best practices. He blurs the line of low and high in both his choice of subject matter and media, often first laying his canvases on the studio floor to accrue marks of previous paintings. Favoring of a wide-ranging style, Delacruz’s work manages to simultaneously achieve a sense of tranquility and dislocation.  

Solo exhibitions of his work have taken place at: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, in New York City;  Goldies Gallery in New York City; Et Al in San Francisco, California; Rachel Uffner in New York City; and The Middler in Brooklyn, New York City. His work has also been included in group and two-person exhibitions in numerous venues, including: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara; Cheim & Read in New York City; Loyal Gallery Stockholm in Stockholm, Sweden; Shoot The Lobster in Los Angeles, California; The Loon in Toronto, Canada; Pilar Corrias in London, UK; American Medium in Brooklyn, New York; The Journal Gallery in Brooklyn, New York; and the Oakland Museum of Art in Oakland, California; among others.