Alejandro Diaz: Rooms and Places: San Antonio

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. A fully illustrated catalogue will be published, accompanied by an essay by artists’ advocate Jimmy LeFlore. 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.

Diaz describes the canvas as the “site where I work things out,” approaching it with vague notions and allowing the work to emerge intuitively. 

 After creating artworks through fabricators for many years, Diaz returned to painting, a more tactile and personal practice that grounded him. The stark switch granted him the freedom to paint and create a variety of narrative works, often in his kitchen. “I started to feel like I was losing touch with the work, and the best way to get back in touch with it was to make something with my own hand,” says Diaz.

Throughout the exhibition, Diaz draws on recurring natural motifs, such as the sun and moon.

“A moon is painted, and it establishes space, location, mood, time, emotion, pattern, weight, symmetry, counterbalance, light and reflection, and darkness; and so does a painted sun, or the contents of a room or farm.  His images are not simple, but rendered gently with a poetic voice.  His painting is free, but not childlike. It’s surprising and mesmerizing when you look at it closely. I like it. Cool and warm. Light within dark." — Jimmy LeFlore

 In Agave Field and Color Field, Diaz uses an agricultural field as a color palette, replacing crops with yellows, blues, and oranges. About the works, Jimmy LeFlore states: “Creators know about live-work spaces. They understand we’re all a product of our environment, and that ‘environment’ is all-encompassing.  Environment is both the drought and the harvest, a combination of fealty and reward.  It nurtures via an accumulation of days, years, and generations.”

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 these art giants to go 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 oneif you’re really painting, they walk out.” Diaz approaches painting as a solitary act, wherein calmness, beauty, and poetry emerge through the act of painting itself.