Alejandro Diaz: Rooms and Places

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present Alejandro Diaz: Rooms and Places, concurrent solo exhibitions of paintings by artist Alejandro Diaz at our San Antonio and New York City galleries. The exhibition will be on view at our San Antonio gallery from January 21, 2026, to February 28, 2026, with an opening reception on January 21 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. A fully illustrated catalogue will be published, accompanied by an essay by artists’ advocate Jimmy LeFlore. A conversation between Alejandro Diaz and Jimmy LeFlore will be held on January 24 from 1:00 to 3:00 PM. This exhibition marks the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with Ruiz-Healy Art. Rooms and Places is a homecoming to Diaz’s earliest medium, painting, a practice that provides the artist with a tactile connection to the world around oneself and others.

Based in New York, Alejandro Diaz developed his distinct body of work while growing up in San Antonio, Texas, and living in Mexico City from 1990 to 1994. This background deeply informed his art, which reflects the complex and visually rich cultural environment of South Texas and Mexico. After years of producing work through fabricators, painting reemerged as a way for the artist to reconnect with his artistic practice. Diaz describes the canvas as the “site where I work things out,” approaching it with vague notions and allowing the work to emerge intuitively.

The artist embraces imperfections in his work, not covering up mistakes in an immaculate way. Instead, he employs the practice of pentimento, the visible traces of earlier painting beneath the final surface of a work. Philosophically, he views pentimento as a “truer representation” of the human part underneath the veneer of reality. LeFlore states, “Nothing is wasted or disregarded. Whether in detail or in gesture, he approaches representation and subject as points of intersection, aware of all that’s full and/or empty, near and/or far, elementary and/or vast.”

Diaz often turns to external inspiration when deciding on the tone and narrative of his paintings, referencing the Western art-historical canon of Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, and Francisco Goya, but only allows their work to inspire him so far. He notes the ideology of Phillip Guston, “When you’re in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you…and one by one if you’re really painting, they walk out. If you’re really painting, you walk out.” Diaz approaches painting as a solitary act, wherein calmness, beauty, and poetry emerge through the act of painting itself. Landscapes are also prominent throughout the exhibition, as the artist often paints to connect with something greater than himself. Reverence for the environment can be felt and understood in works such as The Lavender Hour.