b. 1989, San Francisco, CA
Lives and works in Berkeley, CA and New York, NY
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.
Born in 1989 in San Francisco CA, Rafael Delacruz lives and works in Berkeley, CA and New York, NY. His most recent exhibition Healing Finger Clean Drawings was on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York in 2023.
