Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Video, Collage
Website: miandn.com/artists/rafael-delacruz
Rafael Delacruz was born in 1989 in San Francisco, CA. He studied film theory at San Francisco State University, earning a BFA, and went on to develop a self-taught painting practice rooted in drawing, printmaking, and mixed media experimentation. He lives and works in Berkeley, CA and New York, NY.
Delacruz came up through San Francisco’s independent art community, showing early work at spaces like Et al. (San Francisco) and building connections to galleries across the United States, Europe, and Australia. Over the following decade he expanded his reach internationally, with solo and group exhibitions at Reyes | Finn (Detroit), Loyal Gallery (Stockholm), Pilar Corrias (London), and Mitchell-Innes & Nash (New York), among others. In 2025, San Francisco’s Altman Siegel presented his debut exhibition with that gallery, titled Montage.
His practice bridges painting and time-based media. In addition to canvas-based work, he has produced video sculpture and zines, publishing two limited-run artist books with Nieves (Zurich). He has also maintained an ongoing correspondence and collaborative dialogue with Japanese photographer Seiichi Furuya, resulting in a joint exhibition at Cushion Works in San Francisco in 2024.
Delacruz’s paintings begin with drawing—sketching figures, objects, and architectural fragments—then building layered compositions through photocopying, cutting, silkscreening, and painting over those collaged surfaces. He works in oil and acrylic on canvas and wood panel, often incorporating cochineal (a natural dye derived from cactus parasites), lithographic prints, lino-cut prints, and alcohol ink video. The result is imagery poised on the edge of legibility: cars, figures, everyday objects, and West Coast urban architecture appear and dissolve in fields of diaphanous color.
His work resists both stylistic uniformity and clean narrative resolution. Painted color fields function simultaneously as compositional screens and emotional atmospheres, obscuring and revealing information in shifting rhythms. Critics have described the paintings as characterized by “a sort of formlessness that comes from a total, confident faith in process”—surreal, occasionally humorous, and always grounded in attentive mark-making. More recently, Delacruz has extended this approach into time-based media, producing video sculptures that blur the formal boundaries between painting and moving image.
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