Jega Delisca (b. 1998, West Palm Beach, Florida) is a Portrait Artist based in Montreal, Canada where he is pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Concordia University, specializing in Studio Arts. The youngest of six brothers and the son of Haitian immigrants, his identity as a queer Black man and Floridian transplant to Toronto forms the unique lens through which Delisca’s work is made.

Arriving in Scarborough from West Palm Beach at the age of nine, Delisca’s formative experiences in both cities as a queer black male inform the questions he explores as a painter.

His work exists within the dissociative tension between one’s inner experience of selfhood and the projected cultural scripts about one’s identity. Drawing heavily on his own intimate relationships for subject matter and emphasizing the processual aspect of painting, Delisca’s work asks: Can portraiture offer a site of refuge from male aggression? Can the relational exchange essential to portraiture expand an artist’s rendering? Can it challenge and deepen a viewer’s perceptions?

Delisca’s practice unearths the interiority of his subjects to explore and depict unseen aspects of Black masculinity. Fundamental to Delisca’s practice are the somatic elements of portraiture including the fact of sitting with his subject. Portraiture transforms the painter and subject’s experience of time and the other—particularly the male other—and allows the painter to gaze at and engage with his subject uninterrupted.

Portraiture for Delisca, then, is a contained site of male intimacy and vulnerability without the threat of male aggression. The intimacy borne of this exchange is rendered for the viewer who, through Delisca’s particular gaze, (re-)encounters the subject on unique terms. Delisca’s paintings—I can feel you watching me (2024) and Rearview (2023), to name a few—foreground his subject’s emotionality through this steady and curious gaze, effectively troubling dominant and harmful ideas often projected onto Black individuals and communities.

Delisca was featured in Footprints (May 2024), a group exhibition at the London, UK artist-run gallery Chilli Art Projects which examined physical and emotional relationships with one’s environment. His first solo exhibition Don’t Go Unspoken (2021) at Toronto’s Whippersnapper Gallery offered contemplations on grief, friendship, and coming-of-age in Scarborough. “The Carefree Black Boy Project” (2016-2018) earned Delisca the Community Organizing Award from R.I.S.E. Edutainment in 2017 along with funding totaling $7000 from ArtReach and the City of Toronto. The project created spaces for Black males to explore themselves without limits, and to question dominant ideas around masculinity, sexuality, spirituality, and identity.

Delisca’s work continues to foreground an examination of masculinity and intimacy while troubling the boundaries between one’s social body and one’s inner experience.

JEGA DELISCA | VISUAL ARTIST