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. 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 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 Oakland. Delacruz will participate in the 2022 Marin Headlands Center for the Arts Artist in Residence program.
[excerpted from Mitchell-Innes & Nash website: www.miandn.com]
