Characterized by a unique mastery of painting, David Antonio Cruz’s sensual canvases celebrate diverse facets of human relationships and emotions, positioned at the intersection of historical portraiture and personal narratives. By playing with and subverting traditional portraiture, Cruz captures the humanity around him in its deepest “truth,” creating a place in art history for queer communities that have long been excluded.
Recently, Cruz held two significant exhibitions, including a just-concluded solo show “come close, like before” at Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and “When the Children Come Home,” which traveled to the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in New York after its debut at the ICA Philadelphia last year. Both exhibitions showcase works that reflect Cruz’s exploration of a broader definition of familial connections—a theme he began to examine during the pandemic in his Chosen Family series. Unlike biological family or bonds formed via romantic love, “chosen family,” Cruz explained to Observer, represents a supportive structure within a community, something that became especially prominent during the pandemic when people were expected to “isolate with family.” This led him to reflect on what family means in a world where people are increasingly displaced and detached from their roots. “They were really just a way for you to be present and unconditionally love someone,” Cruz said, speaking to the unique support system queer communities have built. “It doesn’t come with rules, gender, class, race, or issues; you are my family because you are, and that’s the beauty of it.”
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Cruz aimed to document these support structures, which remain invisible to much of society yet have been crucial for many people’s survival during challenging times. To convey this, Cruz’s compositions often focus on moments of physical connection that, without words, reveal the emotional bonds between his subjects. His works carry a profound empathy, capturing intimate moments of touch, strength, and support as a celebration of queer relationships. Through this lens, his art transcends specific themes to address the universality of togetherness, needing no distinctions or classifications. Personal, biographical and political, David Antonio Cruz’s work offers an intimate visual conversation on the universal feelings of love, support and comfort.
While Cruz’s works are masterfully painted in a hyperrealistic style, the process behind them makes their themes and underlying philosophy even more compelling. Engaging in something like a social experiment, Cruz gathers his subjects in living-room settings, inviting them to bring people they consider family, thus creating a collaboration between artist and subjects. In this intimate entanglement of stories, personalities and sensibilities, connections emerge through garments, accessories and expressions. Cruz then portrays his subjects in scenes of physical and emotional intimacy that celebrate human connections beyond categories. “There’s this beautiful intimacy in the world that’s important,” he said.
In these collaborative sessions, Cruz’s role extends beyond the consumptive gaze of an artist capturing a scene on canvas; his process requires genuine human interaction with his subjects, beginning with phone conversations and continuing in person. As Cruz explained, this is essential for fostering the trust that allows his subjects to share their stories fully, naturally revealing their connections and celebrating these energetic links between resonating souls through the power of art. By connecting deeply and empathetically, Cruz creates human collages of emotions and union, the result of a series of rituals of communion. “Sometimes I even make dinners; I bring food,” he shared. “I feel that cooking can be a way to partake and celebrate, especially food, so I make that part of the ritual. That is how we say thank you, I see you, and we celebrate this moment together. Sometimes, we go out to eat afterward. My process has different variations, depending on the group size and discussion.”
All of Cruz’s paintings are fueled by a desire to represent stories too often untold, to celebrate unconditional love, communion, and the joy that results—shifting focus away from the drama that dominates mainstream media and balancing trauma with pleasure. In this way, his work embodies a necessary shift from memorializing violence to celebrating joy. In contrast to his earlier works that commemorated queer individuals who had been murdered and forgotten, Cruz’s current pieces capture joyful, intimate moments with people who are alive and with whom he has deeply connected.
Simultaneously, his work expresses a specific desire to claim a place in art history for figures who have often been erased from it. “I think about painting and what it does when I think about history and how it fixes time,” Cruz said. “Right now, I just think it’s so important to fix folks in a way where, in this moment, we talk about a community that might not be discussed in a particular way.”
His opulent, sensual use of color and texture further emphasizes how his paintings demand viewers’ attention and claim space for the narratives they represent. His works are rooted in art historical tradition, referencing its masters and genres in terms of pose, composition and the use of oil paint itself, yet they deliberately subvert the canon of Western portraiture, challenging its inherent biases. According to Cruz, he’d “rather play with and subvert the canon rather than force the gatekeepers of art history for permission or an invitation to partake in discussions of representation.”
The artist’s fascination with human figures is deeply personal, influenced by his family background and the loss of all his family photos at one point. “Photographs hold so much memory, and to me, it’s just so important to fix that time with an image,” he said. Unlike a photographer, however, Cruz is intentional in translating his scenes, accentuating poses, altering clothing and adjusting spatial perspective to heighten the feeling of emotional and psychological connection. “I think a lot about how something is rendered next to something else… how it should be abstracted, how something takes the space, how it falls apart and how tension works between the subjects. From that, I start constructing this whole world around them.”
In staging these emotional moments, Cruz twists and manipulates his figures into acrobatic entanglements that evoke the fluidity of the Baroque, intentionally flipping classical poses within meticulously staged spaces to convey a sense of dynamic, intimate interaction between his subjects.
In the show at Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, as he did previously at ICA Philadelphia, this staging of narratives also takes over and expands into the space, as the artist creates entire environments between the wallpapers and sculptural interventions that link his personal memories to the ones of the communities he lived in. Also included in the show at Sugar Hill Museum are his “B-side” works of paper, which further problematize the tension between representation and erasure, adding another enigmatic and meditative poetic layer to the work. These works always feature entanglements of recognizably Caribbean vegetation as the first decodable element but slowly reveal some human presence behind it, emerging at and at the same time concealing in a liminal tension between hiding and disguising that essentially characterizes the queer condition.
Eventually, as those new works reveal, Cruz is interested in capturing not an image of bodies or faces, but a specific Aura. “When I start to paint, there’s a different truth to me,” he explains, “That’s a more honest truth. It’s not about the faces or the eyes. It’s your spirit. It’s that aura that, to me, is the truth.”Ultimately, David Antonio Cruz’s paintings participate in a movement that centers joy over trauma, celebrating the possibility of love, joy and beauty beyond racial, sexual and cultural identification to inspire a universal communion between human beings.
Similar to the ICA Philadelphia show, Cruz’s staging of narratives at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum expands into the space, creating immersive environments with wallpaper and sculptural interventions that link his personal memories to those of the communities he has lived in. This iteration of “When The Children Come Home” also includes his ‘B-side’ works on paper, which further explore the tension between representation and erasure, adding an enigmatic and meditative poetic layer to the exhibition. These pieces always feature entanglements of recognizably Caribbean vegetation as the initial, decodable element, gradually revealing traces of human presence behind it. This presence emerges and simultaneously conceals itself, embodying a liminal tension between hiding and disguising that essentially characterizes the queer experience.
Ultimately, as these new works reveal, Cruz is less interested in capturing bodies or faces than in portraying a distinct aura. “When I start to paint, there’s a different truth to me,” he explained. “That’s a more honest truth. It’s not about the faces or the eyes. It’s your spirit. It’s that aura that, to me, is the truth.” Cruz’s paintings, in essence, participate in a movement that centers joy over trauma, envisioning love, joy and beauty beyond racial, sexual,and cultural identities, inspiring a universal communion between human beings.
“When The Children Come Home” is on view at Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in New York through February 16.