This month in London, two men from Texas will look across the room towards one another. The distance between them will only be a few feet, but it will also span generations.
The first man, an aging rancher whose face is shadowed by a cowboy hat, looks behind him, uncertainty in his eyes. The second man, unclothed and youthful, wears a mournful expression as he crouches on the floor, held by his male lover, who’s also naked and perched on a bed. Taken together, they’re a portrait of change—in a family, in types of manhood, and in Texas itself. The first a creature of the old ways, the second a symbol of the new, uncertain whether his forefathers have room in their land and in their hearts for men like him.
The two men, who appear in separate paintings, are in reality one and the same: RF. Alvarez, an Austin-based artist who specializes in intricate, Renaissance-style portraiture, and who has become a darling of the international art circuit. At his upcoming solo show, “The Look Back” (also the name of the second painting of the nudes) at Taymour Grahne Projects in London, many of the works depict Alvarez, his husband, and his friends with a startling and sensual intimacy.
Alvarez, who goes by Robert, has a story that embodies twenty-first century Texas. On his mother’s side, he is descended from six or seven generations of cattle ranchers (he’s lost count) from Cuero, Texas, including the grandfather who inspired the self-portrait. (That’s his Resistol on Alvarez’s head in the painting, deepening the connection between them and between the men and Texas lore.) His father is an immigrant from Mexico. Alvarez often explores and subverts the image of the cowboy, capturing the hard-won pleasures of vaquero life, alongside the loneliness of the desperado, with a queer subtext that is impossible to miss. The end results are dreamy and cinematic, low-lit and evocative, a sort of inverse of Edward Hopper’s lonely urbanites. Alvarez’s subjects might be longing to connect, but they are rarely alone. Even the aging rancher has a calf by his side.
The artist achieves this effect through an Old World technique that he says he “stole” from the Italian tenebrist painter Caravaggio, one that emphasizes spare lighting to create intense drama in even the most ordinary scenes, like a group of friends gathered over drinks at a bar. “The overriding thing that I’ve always found very attractive about his work is this particular use of light,” says Nick Campbell, director of the Austin-based Campbell Art Advisory and Campbell Art Collective. “I’ve spoken to him at length about Caravaggio’s impression upon him. He was the absolute master at creating these scenarios where everything was illuminated by this one particular light source. And so, Robert is doing that in such an interesting and modern way, putting individuals in everyday scenarios on a very subtle pedestal.”
As the writer Emily R. Pellerin describes it in an essay for “The Look Back,” Alvarez employs acrylic paint on raw linen (as opposed to canvas), “and fights against the linen with each brushstroke.” Ultimately, the linen is soaked with paint. “This tactic lends, in a practical sense, a preservable quality to the works,” Pellerin writes. “Artistically, the effect is one of diffusion, of softness, akin to pixelation up close.” In other words, Alvarez’s work is built to last as long as those crafted by the old masters who inspired him, but with an artistic effect at home in our digital-first era.
With his thin, dark beard, wiry frame, denim-on-denim uniform worn with Lucchese cowboy boots—his grandfather’s, and another talisman of his family’s ranching heritage—Alvarez resembles a young Kris Kristofferson. Between these good looks, an incurable affability, and a willingness to sell himself and his work through modern channels (he has more than 22,500 followers on Instagram and more than 70,000 on TikTok, where one pinned video of his process has nearly a half-million views) he is a sort of the Glen Powell of the art scene, gamely charming his way up the ladder of success. “He’s uniquely poised to do well, because he’s the full package,” says Ricky Morales, the cofounder of the Martha’s art gallery in Austin, who has worked with Alvarez at a variety of art fairs. “And he’s handsome,” he adds with a laugh.
“His eloquence as a painter is one thing, but his eloquence as a writer, his eloquence as a speaker, that’s a characteristic that a lot of artists don’t have,” Pellerin says. “He’s just a very social character. And he is an entrepreneur, and I’m sure that all the galleries he works with are so pleased with how on top of it he is.”
Alvarez, 35, is also a natural-born storyteller. Go into a gallery show of an artist’s latest work, and you might stumble onto a theme or a motif. Enter an Alvarez show, and you’ll walk through a three-act tale, with each piece carefully chosen and placed according to its role within that narrative.
In the case of “The Look Back,” the story is inspired in part by the Greek myth of Orpheus, in which the namesake poet journeys to the underworld to rescue his dead lover, Eurydice. He persuades the guards to release her under one condition: He must not look back at her until they both return to the land of the living. He makes it, but he looks back and Eurydice is returned to the underworld forever. “There’s a lot of interpretations about why he turns around,” Alvarez says, explaining the connection. “He doesn’t trust the gods. He doesn’t trust her maybe. Or he’s so in love with her” that he can’t help but look back. “But I like this idea that one has to journey into the underworld—into sort of the bowels of the subconscious or into debauchery—to understand themselves. One has to return to Texas to understand what they need to turn around and address, and look at, and let go of.
“A lot of this body work is about sort of letting go of this expectation of myself,” he adds, gesturing at the self-portrait of the artist as an aging rancher. “That’s my grandfather. That’s me as my grandfather. And I’m not going to be that person. And it’s okay.” He then gestures at the portrait of himself as himself. “I’m this person.”
That person was shaped by his upbringing “in the shadow of a cowboy”—both his grandfather and the Texan male ideal—as a self-described “gay kid from San Antonio.” He spent time on that grandfather’s ranch, where he often felt like he was falling short of that the patriarch’s approval. At 18, he left Texas to study history and sociology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, with no intention of returning. “I left saying, ‘This place doesn’t want me, and I don’t want it back,’ ” he recalls. He spent his postgraduate years working as a graphic designer in New York City and Los Angeles, always painting on the side, and backpacking around Europe and Asia.
Ironically, it was on a drive through the Lone Star State that his plans changed. He met his now-husband, who hailed from Austin, and before long, the two lived together in Los Angeles. But when his husband, Chase Calvert, got into Dell Medical School at the University of Texas, Alvarez returned to the state permanently. He began painting more seriously, selling his work through social media, before devoting himself full-time to it around the time he turned 30. Coming home, and reckoning with his heritage as a gay Texan, was like “finally finding a thread worth pulling out,” he says.
“That was the first time I started to reconcile with addressing my relationship with this place,” he says. “And the work is how I’ve been playing it out.” He mentions depicting himself in cowboy garb. “I’m interested in invalidating all the judgment and expectation that comes with it, almost to say, ‘F— you, I can wear this, too.’ It’s about the vulnerability of the queer body, but also a revolt against not feeling like I was able to wear the hat, metaphorically.”
In doing so, he presents a cowboy that is tender and emotional, rather than stoic—perhaps truer to the real thing than the John Wayne version of it. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, his work has resonated with straight male collectors, as well as gay men. Indeed, his paintings have found an audience almost from the start.
In 2021, he self-produced a show called “Tender Is the Heart.” This earned him a follow-up show at the trendy Preacher Gallery the next year, and one of his works now hangs in the third-floor lounge of the Soho House on South Congress, where Campbell discovered his work. Several group and solo shows followed, but arguably his biggest breakthrough came earlier this year, when T: The New York Times Style Magazine commissioned two paintings to run alongside an essay on the trope of the gay best friend by cultural critic Mark Harris (whose husband is the playwright Tony Kushner). The pieces included a portrait of Alvarez’s husband, laughing over martinis with a friend, demonstrating the artist’s newfound focus on work with a more intimate and vulnerable subject matter. Perhaps not coincidentally, with his unruly hair and shaggy beard, his husband in the painting somewhat resembles another iconic cinematic cowboy actor, albeit in off-camera mode: a young Clint Eastwood.
Alvarez discovered his passion for painting around age eight, when his father and grandmother took him to the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, home to Monet’s Water Lilies. “It f—ed me up,” he says. “It really got me. I think maybe I’m always on a trajectory of trying to arrive at something even remotely close to that.” But as he got older, he realized that in the art scene, an earnest love of Impressionism was considered, well, uncool. This, in part, is why he didn’t go to art school, or pursue his passion full-time until relatively later in life—by that time, there were fewer gatekeepers, and social media could provide a larger audience than a gallery show ever could.
Not that Alvarez neglects the IRL experience of his work. In addition to the deliberate and meticulous placement of the paintings—many of which are made more overpowering by their size—he approaches shows with the care of a hospitality expert running a trendy hotel or buzzy restaurant. At a New York show, he presented his own writing on the walls alongside his artwork. At the London show, visitors can spritz a custom scent crafted by Connor McDonald, an Austin perfumer. (It was still in progress during our interview, but the goal is a blend of Texas cedar, smoke, Narcissus flower, oud, musk, and horses to evoke the feeling of remembering the underworld a la Orpheus.) For a future Austin show, he is considering hosting wine tastings.
But even as Alvarez’s work gains notice internationally, he returns to the subject of his home state, which he depicts with a sensuality and sweat and even a plainness that feels recognizably Texan, something he shares with fellow natives from Beyoncé to Larry McMurtry. “You can feel the temperature of the works,” says Morales. “If it’s humid or chilly, he’s kind of painting temperature. It sets the tone for us in Texas.” Of course, there’s a twist with what previous Texas artists have depicted. “Here we have somebody who’s making queer cowboy paintings, but they’re not necessarily leaning too far in one direction or the other. They’re not flamboyant or over the top. There is lots of masculinity in the queer community itself that I think is coming out in the work.”
The Texasness also comes out in the show’s depiction of nature, whether it’s a portrait set in the Greenbelt or just the sky in the background of a domestic scene. “The best sunsets you ever see are in the H-E-B parking lot,” Alvarez says with a laugh, explaining another standout piece, Trash Night, in which the artist looks back at his house, where his husband is enjoying a glass of wine inside, while placing a familiar brown bin by the curb. Except it isn’t his house—it’s his grandmother’s, a place where he found stability as a boy after his parents’ divorce. The painting represents the idea of home, and true to the show’s title, he is, in fact, looking back at it.
“What’s the expression?” Alvarez asks. “The longer the branches, the deeper the roots.” His now seem firmly planted.
