Julio Galan's hothouse icons - Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico

Art in America, July, 1994 by Brooks Adams

A current traveling survey of works by a young Mexican painter reveals a versatile pictorial imagination and an eclectic stylistic repertory.

Julio Galan is the most galvanizing painter to have come out of Mexico in quite some time. A travelling retrospective of the work of this Monterrey-based artist, which I saw at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, made this point abundantly clear. (The show originated at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey [MARCO] and is now at the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami.) Although the exhibition offers countless images of narcissistic stasis in which the artist depicts himself dressed up in a variety of guises, the sheer pictorial invention of Galan's art argues for a more protean vitality. Indeed, with its persistently dandified stance, Galan's painting seems to insist that a deliberate marginality can be crucial to the cultivation of a hothouse, homoerotic art.

Born in 1958 (although the catalogue says 1959), Galan was something of a child prodigy. In fact, much of his early work adumbrates a romanticized vision of a cartoon boy-hero, a kind of gay Tintin, who, we may conclude, also belongs to the art-historical tradition of the Romantic Child. In an informative catalogue essay by the Mexican writer Sergio Pitol we learn that Galan spent a large part of his childhood on his grandfather's mining estate in Muzquiz, in the northern state of Coahuila, which has one of the largest bear preserves in the world. Hence the preponderance of animal specifically ursine, imagery in the early work. Far from being just an effete boy with a prodigious doll collection, Galan was a voracious tyro who invested his early paintings with a powerful animism.

Galan's art, as well as his biography, strives toward a deliberately precious, and sometimes willfully obnoxious, cult of the self. Pitol recounts an Eloise-ish anecdote about an eight- or nine-year-old boy entering Guillermo Sepulveda's gallery in Monterrey, gazing at one or two paintings and then being whisked away by a chauffeur. Some years later the same boy reappeared with a batch of his own paintings, which Sepulveda showed for the first time in 1980. Mostly to please his father, Galan studied architecture in Monterrey from 1978 to 1982, all the while pursuing his painting. Finally in 1984 he decamped to New York, where he was quickly drawn into the East Village scene and the Warhol circle; one of his earliest exhibition credits was a show put together by Paige Powell and Edit DeAk in DeAk's SoHo loft in 1986. In that same year Galan was also drawn into the European network of the Amsterdam dealer Barbara Farber; in New York he showed with Annina Nosei and in Rome with Gian Enzo Sperone.

I remember having my first revelation about Galan's paintings in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1988 and being surprised that this relatively unknown artist's work stood up so well in a permanent collection that includes such works as Salvador Dali's consummately weird Shirley Temple, the Youngest Sacred Monster of Her Time (1939). By 1989, Galan was becoming an international art star, the only Mexican to be represented in the multicultural exhibition "Magiciens de la Terre" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In the early '90s he became a fixture in the big surveys of Latin American art, most recently "Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century" at MOMA (see A.iA., Dec. '93) where his large work Si y no (1990) was given pride of place at the entrance of the exhibition.

Galan has capitalized on his Mexican heritage even as he has become a world-class artist. He has made extensive use of Mexican folk imagery in an almost Pop vein, mimicking, for example, the gaudy floral dresses of the women of Tehuantepec, the religious imagery of 19th-century ex-voto paintings and the saccharine depictions of flowers on Mexican painted furniture and tin boxes. Yet Galan's persona as an exacerbated esthete and his penchant for allegories of androgyny, specifically his exalted form of sister-worship, suggest affinities with European Symbolism. In particular, Gustave Moreau (soon to be the subject of a show at Mexico City's Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo in fall '94) and the Belgian Ferdinand Khnopff (likewise hung up on his sister) are both precedents evoked by Eleanor Heartney in her catalogue essay for the MARCO show. Galan is also perfectly in sync with the latest contemporary European and American developments: the wild, technical experimentation of his more recent work, as Jerry Saltz points out in his catalogue essay, suggests a firsthand knowledge of Sigmar Polke, even as the freighted Catholic imagery of Galan's art has much in common with Julian Schnabel's latter-day Spanish baroque extravaganzas. Upon longer reflection, we can see that Galan's outlook was internationalist from the outset, largely due to his country's rich multicultural past and his own privileged upbringing. It has become even more wide-reaching since he returned to Monterrey.