Raul Rene Gonzalez is a San Antonio, Texas-based artist whose work is largely autobiographical in nature, exploring topics such as fatherhood, gender roles, labor, identity, pop culture, and abstraction.
Raul Rene Gonzalez is a multidisciplinary artist who incorporates a wide range of media and methods in his paintings, drawings, sculptures, clothing, murals, installations, live and recorded dance, and other performance-based work. Largely autobiographical in nature, his work explores topics such as fatherhood, gender roles, labor, identity, pop culture, and abstraction.
Whether he’s creating finely detailed figurative drawings or large geometric abstractions, consistent across his work is the use of bright, bold colors that draw in the viewer and bring a sense of energy to each piece.
“This body of work, Artist-Parents, is a collaboration between me and six working artists living in Texas. I asked each artist to create or produce an image that captured how they balance art and family life. After receiving all the images, I recreated the images as oil paintings.
“The artists I collaborated with are multi-disciplinary artist Robert Hodge, artist and community organizer Matt Manalo, and multi-disciplinary artist Julia Barbosa Landois of Houston; dancer and performance artist Amber Ortega and photographer Anthony Francis of San Antonio; and artist and curator Sara Vanderbeek of Austin.”
A Houston native now based in San Antonio, Texas with his wife and two daughters, Gonzalez’s experiences living in two of the biggest metropolitan cities in the country influence nearly all of his bodies of work—from detailed urban landscapes that pay homage to the workers who build and maintain cities to his wearable construction barrel suits, to paintings that document key features of San Antonio’s musical history, a series now displayed permanently in City Hall.
As an active member of the art community, Gonzalez regularly mentors up-and-coming young artists and is also a resident artist and director at Clamp Light Studios & Gallery, an artist-run space in San Antonio.