Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition for artist Rafael Delacruz (b. 1989). On view from June 1 through July 7, 2023, Rafael Delacruz: Healing Finger Clean Drawings will feature all new work, including approximately 12 new paintings and a video.

The artist Rafael Delacruz’s mother visits Mexico each winter for New Year’s. This past year, she brought back cochineal, a natural dye. Cochineal is a parasite, ruins cacti, and comes in little block-form pellets. If diluted properly, it can be mixed to make oil paint and various colors. Through a process of trial and error, and with the help of the internet and a zine from Moe’s Books in Berkeley, Rafael worked out how to make red, pink, green, and orange.

Cochineal is a powerful pigment with a cultural history that involves tinting Catholic clergy capes and the coats of English soldiers; it’s in candy, make up, and a heap of mass-produced foods. He’s done the research but acknowledges that his use of the dye can’t possibly compete with its significance, and that he’s not employing it as a metaphor. He’s just using it, and in a way, it’s using him. It’s just what happened.

Rafael doesn’t exactly like cars, but he likes their shape, and he really likes drawing and painting them. Ken Price had cups, what if I had a car? He’s motivated in part because there’s a personal, annoying, and otherworldly aspect to automobiles in his life.

Paintings often start as drawings; first drafts are camouflaged; improvisation and reinterpretation are prized. How to paint a person petting a dog but not. Some paintings have lino-cut prints layered across the canvas. They are odd, analog procedurals, and he’s always trying to distort and recycle processes and memories back into the work itself. Most are in landscape mode, and discernible content is stacked on the same visual plane against a horizon-like circumstance. He told me once that he wants to “unlock the flatness.” Car on head on laundry on sidewalk. But when you move back, the ground shifts, separates.

There’s a video playing in the exhibition, too. It’s short, and depicts live painting, so to speak: alcohol ink applied to paper, but it’s filmed from the opposite side, so the image magically materializes in the frame. Then he overlapped live rotoscoping footage, digital line drawings, and interludes in which images are constructed entirely from characters on a keyboard. You’re not just watching someone draw, but seeing someone build a small, strange world one piece at a time.

There’s nothing else that really looks like this. Healing Finger Clean Drawings. Biomorphic city desert symbology. Thought bubble.

(Text by Jordan Stein)

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 Espers was on view at Reyes | Finn in Detroit, Michigan in 2022.