The Brooklyn Rail

Before tackling Teresa Eckmann’s nearly 300-page monograph, Julio Galán: The Art of Performative Transgression, I thought I knew the work of the late Mexican painter pretty well: I interviewed him in Mexico in the mid-1990s, I have written about his work, and a small collection of books and exhibition catalogues about him sit on my shelves, but Eckmann’s discussion early on in her book of one of Galán’s best-known works, the 1991 painting Los siete climas [Seven Climates], made it clear to me that I have much to learn, and that Eckmann has much to reveal. An imposing painting (91 by 59 inches), Los siete climas depicts the artist with black geometric designs painted onto his bare chest. He also sports a conical skirt with bold stripes, an elaborate feather headdress and a pair of sandals. The background features irregular black and white horizontal stripes, an image of an Art Deco clock and some random glyphic shapes. If the figure’s costume and body paint suggest Mexico’s pre-Columbian past, the stark black-and-white backdrop is vaguely New Wave (think the cover of Blondie’s Parallel Lines). As in so many Galán paintings, the figure seems at once bewildered and self-possessed, and like nearly every one of his paintings, Los siete climas smolders with pictorial complexity and weird narrative. I suspect that, like me, most viewers read the linear decorations on the figure’s chest either as purely abstract marks or some kind of “primitive” symbolic geometry. In fact, they are alphabetic letters (OTO). Eckmann establishes this by examining a contact sheet of shots taken by Juan Rodrigo Llaguno at Galán’s direction. (Galán often had himself photographed in various costumes, sometimes basing paintings on the resulting images, and sometimes using them to enrich his exhibition catalogues.) Delving very deep into the Galán archive—this book is bursting with revelatory illustrations—she also uncovers a Polaroid of Galán’s sandal-clad feet that was clearly another source image for the painting. As Eckmann notes, in Rodrigo Llaguno’s photographs we can see the letter J painted on the artist’s chest, while in Los siete climas it has been left out. In Mexican Spanish, joto is a traditionally derogatory name for gay men, the equivalent of “fag” in American English.

The contradiction between Galán’s initial embrace of a homophobic insult and his subsequent retraction of it through erasure is, for Eckmann, emblematic of the ambiguity with which Galán addressed his own sexuality. Unabashed homoeroticism pervades his paintings, yet he consistently refused to describe himself as gay. When one interviewer asked him if he was “homosexual,” Galán replied simply, “I am sexual.” Images from Rodrigo Llaguno’s contact sheet with the visible “J” have long been available, but to my knowledge Eckmann is the first person to compare them with Los siete climas, thus illuminating not only how multi-layered Galán’s relation to sexuality was but, perhaps even more importantly, how he embodied such complexity in his paintings. Throughout her book she makes similarly revelatory use of photographic documentation. Indeed, the photographers Galán worked with, most of whom Eckmann has interviewed, emerge as significant collaborators, each of them providing the artist with something distinctive. Based like Galán in Monterrey, Rodrigo Llaguno, who has become a prominent portraitist, seems to have been the photographer with whom the artist felt most at ease (they did eight sessions together), while Graciela Iturbide, a generation older than Galán, brought a more formal cinema-like drama to her pictures.

Hoping to “counter the mystique cultivated by the artist,” Eckmann shows how Galán very consciously constructed his public image. She also emphasizes his use of popular culture, identifying how he deployed “lo popular” and “lo cursi” (lo cursi can be translated as “kitsch” but it has specifically Mexican connotations: Carlos Monsiváis defined it as [in translation] “the realist language of the supreme fiction of falling in love”). The written word is integral to Galán’s work—many of his paintings feature enigmatic and poetic phrases—but until reading Eckmann I didn’t know that many of them come from the lyrics of pop songs that happened to be playing in his studio and which the artist spontaneously inscribed onto his canvases. Galán was particularly enamored of the seductive singer-actor Miguel Bosé and the gloriously bad Mexican girl group Flans (check out their 1980s videos on YouTube). As Eckmann acknowledges, Galán was hardly alone among young Mexican painters in the 1980s and 1990s to avail himself of popular culture, but he may have been the only one to fully assimilate his sources into a transcendent art. As Eckmann repeatedly demonstrates, Galán was unafraid of emotionally difficult subjects, such as one of his sisters’ lost pregnancies, which he mourns in a number of paintings.

Although organized thematically rather than chronologically, Julio Galán: The Art of Performative Transgression offers a full account of the artist’s life, from his rebellion against the machismo of his rancher father to the ill-health and isolation of his last years. Among its most fascinating aspects is the close attention given to Galán’s collection of antique dolls and their psychological role in his work. Eckmann seems to have spoken with everybody who was important to Galán, including the many New Yorkers he encountered during his Manhattan years (1984–90). His fearless ambition and brash confidence in his own genius helped offset the handicap of being a Mexican artist at a time when Latinx artists were routinely ghettoized by New York galleries.

This is a very welcome book, and a model of how to approach a (near) contemporary artist. Eckmann’s achievement is all the more impressive since until now there has been no serious English-language art-historical discussion of Galán. The wealth of meaning that Eckmann discovers in and extracts from Galán’s work is at once proof of just how great a painter Galán was—only superlative artists can provide so much material for the historian—and of Eckmann’s own skills. My only reservation is that in her extensive (and persuasive) unpacking of Galán’s iconography, Eckmann devotes so much attention to establishing biographical facts and to elucidating cultural subtexts that she hasn’t left herself much room for fuller discussions of the incredibly various and inventive visual devices Galán employed, but that probably would have led to a book double the length, which I, for one, would have been happy to read. (Just for the record, I have never met Eckmann, but I was one of the outside readers of this book in manuscript for the University of New Mexico Press and she several times cites my account of visiting Galán in Monterrey.) Since the artist’s death at forty-seven in 2006, Galán’s reputation has languished, especially outside of Mexico. His paintings are rarely seen in US galleries, and there has never been a museum exhibition of his work in this country. Could Eckmann’s ground-breaking book change this unfortunate situation? Ojalá!