RF Alvarez: I Remember Everything

Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present I Remember Everything, RF Alvarez's first solo exhibition on the West Coast on view from September 13 - November 1, 2025.

RF Alvarez's richly cinematic paintings weave together scenes of domestic interiors, back porches at night, quiet tableaus of lovers in conversation, and the dust-charged arena of the rodeo. Queer men appear in kitchens, under porch lights, or mid-dance in jeans and white T-shirts, their movements and gestures carrying the charge of closeness, hesitation, and private ritual - moments that feel at once intimate and defiant.

Alvarez’s compositions are anchored in specific, tactile moments: a man striking a match in the dark, another leaning in a doorway; the taut, twisting force of a bull mid-buck; an embrace that folds two bodies into one compressed frame. These fragments of everyday life are heightened by his mastery of light: amber windows cutting through the blue of night, candle glow gathering around wine glasses, shadows pressed into the folds of denim. Throughout, scenes register connection as something both tender and hard-won.

Alvarez's paintings are built from observation but sharpened by staging, drawing on the drama of baroque painting and the pacing of film. Instead of romanticizing the cowboy archetype, Alvarez reclaims and complicates it, presenting queer men in moments of vulnerability, physicality, and self-possession. There is an immediacy to these scenes that invites the viewer not into an abstract idea of place, but into a lived-in world where gesture, glance, and light carry narrative weight.

In a moment when sexuality and national identity are increasingly politicized, Alvarez’s work asks what it means to belong - to oneself, to another person, to a community - when those bonds are under scrutiny. The works in I Remember Everything capture connection not as a fixed state but as something continually negotiated, charged with both tenderness and strength.