The Brooklyn Rail

“If I paint my hair purple or green, if I paint myself with bruises, if I wear 30 diamond rings it is because I need to hide, be someone else, to project myself and my work. With my clothes and my paintings, I set up labyrinths, muddles, clues and obstacles. I know I don’t look the same from portrait to portrait, from one day to another, from one way of painting to another, but I’ve been like this since I was five in order to survive.”

-Julio Galán

If anyone still thought that identity was more than a necessary fiction, the work of Julio Galán (1958-2006), Mexico’s greatest painter, offers the cautionary fable. The first thing to be seen on entering kurimanzutto gallery is a life-sized photographic portrait from 1993 of the artist as a not-so-young man by Graciela Iturbide, a beautiful study by a superb photographer of confidence and diffidence, sadness and strength, approach and retreat. It is the perfect introduction to the work and person. Galán was everywhere in these paintings, even when the figures he depicts refer to those he knew. He was there in the dandy, the martyr, the joker, the vaquero, the woman/sister/mother, the player of games; there, also, in the visions that beset him, of bears and beasts and black clouds and flying spirits. He was there in the blood and roses of anguish, in the jewels and fabrics he rendered with baroque attention, in the mountains of his native state of Coahuila and of Monterrey, and in the moonlight he conjured so evocatively, Pluto’s child. He was there, too, in the art his work evokes, Bosch and Caravaggio distantly, closer in Frida Kahlo, Martín Ramírez, unknown painters of a thousand retablos, and, in a different idiom, the fiction of Juan Rulfo, whose Pedro Páramo came looking for his father in Comala and found only ghosts and voices until he himself became a ghost. Everywhere and nowhere. And not just in order to survive. Galán explored the truth that if identity means something solid, singular, and definite, even something worth defending, it cannot apply to human beings. And it would be intolerably boring if it did.

For reasons that should be obvious, Galán came to New York from Mexico in the early 1980s and became a figure in the downtown scene, mingling with Basquiat, Warhol, and Clemente, among others. I vaguely remembered his name from Annina Nosei Gallery, where he had several shows, but Galán left New York to return to Monterrey and did not leave a significant trace. Perhaps it was the passing of so-called Neo-Expressionism or a matter of personality. People who knew him have described him to me as private, even timid, but also as reclusive, which might explain why neither his paintings nor his reputation traveled. But one painting did appear in the omnibus show Greater New York, at MoMA PS1 in 2021, and José Kuri, Lawrence Luhring, and Roland Augustine all found themselves admiring it at the same time. Their enthusiasm has brought us what no American museum has attempted, a comprehensive selection of more than thirty works, many of them imposingly large, distributed between the two galleries.

Galán’s hermeticism, if we can call it that, since he never attempted to conceal secret doctrine, stems from the intensely personal nature of his works. These paintings seem to present themselves as allegories, with scenes and elements coded to the artist’s life. Evan Moffitt’s essay, commissioned by the two galleries, was very helpful at unpacking some of the references, especially to the female figures who surrounded the young artist in the hothouse atmosphere of an upper-class Mexican country estate. I think the more satisfying approach is not to try to decipher the paintings but to enter the emotional labyrinths they construct and trace for yourself the themes and obsessions that thread through them.

One of the most persistent has to do with binding, or more broadly confinement. Many of Galán‘s images feel like dreams because they are able to evoke succinctly and concretely an awful paranoia. Yo no soy yo, yo soy yo (I am not I, I am I) (1986) depicts Galán entangled in a transparent shroud while above him floats a pair of arms, dressed in a suit, covering or caressing a face that we cannot see. Another, Roma (1990), a giant in three panels and nearly fourteen feet long, shows a tiny Galán tightly ensconced in an immensely long bed with an elaborately brocaded bedspread. At the far end of the bed is a complicated piece of lace work that seems to have detached itself from the spread and is metastasizing in thin air. It is crowned with two roses. It should be a beautiful, even beatific, vision, and it is, but it is also vaguely threatening, like deathbed portrayals of saints and children, or like any hallucination.

This kind of painting, with its obvious debt to Surrealism, is one of maximum risk, revealing either the paucity or the fertility of the artist’s imagination, not to say skill, not to say courage. The downside is not kitsch—there is plenty in Galán’s paintings, plenty of overdoing it—but literalism: once you crack the code, all the paintings are basically the same and no longer troubling. Galán’s paintings continue to trouble us because they never die into unity, never resolve. They practice disidentification. The emotions they evoke, even at their most traumatic, beautiful, or paranoid, are always shadowed by their opposites. Perhaps the most autobiographically revealing painting in the two exhibitions, and the most ambitious, makes the point with overwhelming impact. A massive diptych, Sí y no (Yes and No) (1990), is part portrait, part sex narrative, part landscape, bound together with leather belts, festooned with pieces of a glass chandelier and punctuated with appliqued swatches of pre-Columbian codices. The artist appears half-nude as a confident St. Sebastian or a skirted Indian or some other uncertain private icon. It’s all or nothing with him, and it rebukes the simplistic question of identity as yes or no with yes and no. Never or, always and.