David Antonio Cruz, stay, take your time, my love, ICA SF
By Hugh Leeman
David Antonio Cruz's show, stay, take your time, my love, at ICA SF contrasts layered black and white drawings with the saturated camp of colorful group portraits displaying contorted bodies stacked on Chesterfield Sofas that destabilize the traditional gaze through a top-down perspective. Elements of art history and the academy's technical acumen blend with experimentation and the affection of queer kinship to challenge perceptions and celebrate the dynamic nature of identity while evolving the genre.
Each oil painting is an exploration of technique, leaving traces of the process behind. The backside of a paintbrush scratches through a layer of wet paint to make pinstripes, revealing a wash of rainbow colors beneath a Prussian blue so deep it borders on the spectrum of black. An alizarin crimson underpainting is left alone without the typical cover of skin tones, seizing our attention with its near neon glow, becoming a part of the final product, alongside vulnerable gazes transmitting fleshy intimacy. Optically blended layers vibrate beneath the surface as the greens of Renaissance-era underpainting skillfully distinguish pinks and reds in the subjects' skin. The artist has said of color in his paintings, "That's why my work is so loud now. Some of the works are so seductive and bright and luscious and loud. I'm speaking out against the pain and trauma of silence that so many people of my community experience." [1]
(L) canyoustaywithmetonight_causeyouarehere,youarehere,andweareherewithyou, 2021, Oil and latex on wood panel 72 x 98 in (R)Francis Bacon (1909-1992) “Portrait”, 1962. Oil paint on canvas, 78” x 56”
Amidst such colors, it's almost too easy to overlook the artists' backgrounds that evoke elements of what cultural theorist Rina Arya calls Francis Bacon's space-frames, geometric cage-like structures within which Bacon often confined his figures, suggesting isolation.[2] For Antonio Cruz, elements of Bacon's so-called space-frames, slightly simplified, are set behind his figures, suggesting steps of liberation. The artist also paints visual parallels to Bacon's semi-circular compositions of gradation color fields to create abstract structures upon which the figures rest as if on a pedestal or small stage. Similar curving fields of color form the backdrop to the theatrical scenes. For Antonio Cruz, the further these Bacon-esque curving color fields are from the viewer, the less gradation of color, giving depth to scenes that are otherwise tightly focused on chosen family, a prominent theme in Antonio Cruz's LGBTQ+ community.
Francis Bacon, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, 1969
David Antonio Cruz, ilovedeveryoneofthem, 2022. Oil, acrylic, and ink on wood panel. 72 x 60 inches. Collection of Pamela and David Hornik. Photo: Nicholas Lea Bruno
The artist's fabrics say as much as the figures, whose clothing goes from nylon and shiny polyester to printed cotton button-ups, all of which fall into velvet and satin sofas, displaying the artist's virtuous handling of patterns and stripes that offer a masterclass in fabric painting. The bodies become theatrically compressed into the picture, supported by Chesterfield Sofas, a symbol of status and social order since the late 18th century, taken from their aristocratic past to be reclaimed for a modern queer aesthetic connected to Susan Sontag's camp. Sontag in 1964 wrote, "the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques." [3]
Antonio Cruz's oeuvre merges the small urban cliques associated with the camp aesthetic and the aristocracy of the Chesterfield Sofa, transforming it into a safe space of intimacy through his realistic renderings of the chosen family. Researcher Seohyun Kim writes, "A chosen family is a group of individuals who deliberately choose one another to play significant roles in each other's lives…chosen families in the LGBTQ+ population are considered more emotionally and psychologically supportive than biological families".[4] The artist began painting around the concept of chosen family during the pandemic.[5] Through these group portraits of chosen families, the artist subverts social and artistic expectations of past centuries.
(L) Governors of the Leper Hospital at Haarlem 1667, Jan de Vray 56” x 78” , (R) David Antonio Cruz, stay,takeyourtime,mylove, 2025. Oil, latex, ink, and graphite on wood panel . 72 x 96 inches
Curator and art historian Dr. Susanna V. Temkin astutely connected Antonio Cruz's paintings in his 2021 show Icutfromtehmiddletogetabetterslice to regentessenstuk, 17th-century Dutch group portraits depicting the regents of elite social clubs.[6] While the parallels can be seen throughout stay, take your time, my love, and much of his work of the last several years, the grandest example at the ICA SF is the painting canyoustaywithmetonight_causeyouarehere,youarehere,andweareherewithyou, from the same 2021 show which Temkin wrote about. The connections are seen in the realistic flesh and fabrics of the portraits, whose performative groups offer themselves to the paintings' posterity.
(L) canyoustaywithmetonight_causeyouarehere,youarehere,andweareherewithyou, 2021, Oil and latex on wood panel 72 x 98 in
Conceptually, though, Antonio Cruz's paintings are antithetical to the colonial hierarchy financially connected to the Dutch Golden Age's regentessenstuk, conveying status that upheld highly structured societal norms of the wealthy guilds in a devoutly Christian society that coded its class largely in black and white cloth. In stay, take your time, my love the artists relies on hyper real saturated colors which vibrate with contrast and camp visualizing the world that NYU Professor and Author Jose Esteban Muñoz wrote of in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, "The queer utopian project addressed here turns to the fringe of political and cultural production to offset the tyranny of the homonormative. It is drawn to tastes, ideologies, and aesthetics that can only seem odd, strange, or indeed queer next to the muted striving of the practical and normalcy desiring homosexual."[7]
thesecretofremainingyoungisnevertohaveanemotion,thatisunbecomingthosebarriokids, 2022
Oil and latex on wood panel
Green Family Art Foundation, courtesy of
Adam Green Art Advisory
The aesthetic to which Muñoz refers and that of Antonio Cruz is in conversation through the group portrait genre, goes beyond color and symbol for the artist and into a process that involves getting to know his subjects through dinner parties, sharing elements of art history, and talking fashion before the performative posing for his paintings begins. The pose forms a unique part of Antonio Cruz's contribution to group portraiture, "The way you pose for me isn't just sitting, there's this sense of dripping, of leaning; we're performing and being extra, and for me that's the radical part, that's the joy of being non-conforming and not falling into rules."[8] Significantly, artists like Antonio Cruz contribute to a growing list of contemporary artists whose sitters' race and gender challenge past conceptions of portraiture. "I'm interested in interjecting the portraiture canon with Brown and Black bodies, as well as gender fluid and queer bodies, to complicate hetero-normative perceptions of racial and queer identity and highlight intersectional identities not often discussed or represented in history and society."[9]
Installation view of wallpaper and (R) wallpaper detail with parrots top and bottom left
Similar to previous shows, Antonio Cruz not only depicts safe spaces that challenge structures of the past but constructs them within the exhibition space, offering sofas on which visitors can sit under dozens of crystal chandeliers, taking their time with paintings hung on walls covered in digitally designed patterned wallpaper, embedding elements of San Francisco within the exhibition. In the wallpaper's muted gray tones, the parrots of Telegraph Hill and the palm trees of Dolores Park speak in metaphor of migration, while alluding to the artist's Puerto Rican ancestry. Of his installation for a previous show at the ICA Philadelphia in 2023, the artist said, "The whole space is mapping out a sanctuary, a place of meditation and quietness. I wanted a place where people could walk and just enjoy."
Details of layers of black and white chalk drawings on the artist’s stained paper with segments removed
Further places of quiet and meditation amidst stay, take your time, my love's proudly ostentatious paintings are found in subdued black and white works on paper, echoing the feel of one's gaze looking up through trees to see stippling dots of negative space between leaves. The spaces between leaves manifest in hundreds of pieces cut from a large sheet of paper layered over a second sheet stained black and gray with white chalk drawings of hands and arms emerging from tree limbs. The black and white drawings, a distinct deviation from the light and color in the oil paintings, are described by the artist as shadow moments that take place in the dark.[10]
David Antonio Cruz, stay,takeyourtime,mylove, 2025. Oil, latex, ink, and graphite on wood panel . 72 x 96 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Photo: Nicholas Lea Bruno
The drawings' shadow moments hang between the group portraits at ICA SF allowing the viewer to pause between paintings to consider the distinction of what takes place in the dark and the celebratory color of the chosen family paintings, calling to mind social structures that have long written codes pushing those with queer identities to blend in with the environment, muting the colors of self, obscuring the body beneath the trees of dominant social landscapes. Dark history's shadow moments emphasize the beauty in the artist's process that encourages performance amongst models who donn their camp, contort themselves across couches amidst an orgy of individuals coming together collectively to create community at dinner parties setting the scene before the first sketch while evolving art history via being proudly and permanently captured in such an act within Antonio Cruz's paint.
At ICA San Francisco, the artist invites the visitor to participate and perform similarly, as a scene seemingly out of the oil paintings is set up for selfies, complete with a couch, multi-colored pillows, backdrops of opposing fabrics, and a synthetic rug with a Near Eastern aesthetic resting atop blue and purple checkerboard carpet. If we sit and take our time, we might just find something as radical as intimacy and quiet sanctuary amidst the beautiful riot of contrasting colors.
Citations:
1. "David Antonio Cruz: One Day I'll Turn the Corner and I'll Be Ready for It | 7 September - 26 October 2019 - Overview." Moniquemeloche, www.moniquemeloche.com/exhibitions/16-david-antonio-cruz-one-day-i-ll-turn-the/overview.
2.Arya, Rina. "'The Existential Dimensions of Bacon's Art.'" Francis Bacon: Critical and Theoretical Perspectives, edited by Rina Arya, Peter Lang, 2012, pp. 81–100.
3.Sontag, Susan. "Notes on 'Camp'." Partisan Review, vol. 31, no. 4, Fall 1964, pp. 515–530.
4.Kim, Seohyun, and Israel Fisseha Feyissa. "Conceptualizing 'Family' and the Role of 'Chosen Family' Within the LGBTQ+ Refugee Community: A Text Network Graph Analysis." Healthcare, vol. 9, no. 4, Mar. 2021, p. 369. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare9040369.
5. "When the Children Come Home — Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art and Storytelling." Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art & Storytelling, www.sugarhillmuseum.org/when-the-children-come-home.
6.David Antonio Cruz - - Art - Lehmann Maupin. www.lehmannmaupin.com/art/david-antonio-cruz.
7.Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009.
8.Esposito, Veronica. "'They Don't Come With Rules': David Antonio Cruz Celebrates Queer Chosen Families." The Guardian, 17 Aug. 2023, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/aug/15/artist-david-antonio-cruz-lgbtq-chosen-families-exhibition-philadelphia.
9.Monique Meloche Gallery. DAC 2019 Publication. Monique Meloche Gallery, 2019.
10.Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. "David Antonio Cruz: Hauntme." YouTube, 18 Apr. 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVqyra6twT8.
