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

Art in America, July, 1994 by Brooks Adams

Galan's art may have become more explicitly Mexican in subject matter once he was established in New York. For instance, he seems to have drawn direct inspiration from traditional Mexican religious imagery, on several occasions, he has painted the well-known image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. By 1984 all the hallmarks of an implicit self-identification with Christ were also in place. Galan painted his own face on Milagro (Miracle), 1984, an actual silver-plated votive offering in the shape of the Sacred Heart. In an untitled work of the same year, he limned an image of a gigantic, androgynous Christ, who really looks more like a bearded lady, being adored by a tiny cartoon male astride a bright yellow ladder. The trompe l'oeil depiction of a frame of massed roses behind the ladder also suggests an almost funereal obsession with flowers. This flower imagery has significant repercussions throughout the Galanian oeuvre of pastels (not shown in Mexico City), where roses are often seen to both weep and bleed.

By 1985 and the large painting Quedate conmigo 2 (Stay with Me 2), homoerotic suggestions abound in the figure of Christ on the cross who literally puts his arm around the am of the artist, this time wearing a green jacket festooned with red horses. (In the Mexican painter Nahum B. Zenil's work, we also find homoerotic depictions of the artist with Christ or as Christ.) Galan's gold acrylic canvas seems to bleed drips of red paint from a row of tiny applied Milagros, which in this case are all minuscule photo-reproductions of saints. A Pollock-like splatter of black dripped paint and silver glitter around the edges of the painting renders the symbolic connections between blood and paint, artistic and religious martyrdom afl the more explicit.

Galan's depictions of self-mortification extend even to the realm of still-life fife painting. In the monumental diptych El hermano (nino berenjena y nina Santa Claus) (The Brother [Boy Eggplant and Girl Santa Claus]), 1985, Galan depicts himself as a youth in an eggplant outfit. The huge vegetable form has visibly bleeding wounds, into which the boy plunges his arms, as if he were both Christ and doubting Thomas at once. One of the pleasures of the retrospective was to discover what an original bodegones master Galan was right from the outset. The earliest depictions of strangely truncated eggplants and gourds occur in works such as Juego de barajas y calabazas y yo y yo (Card Game and Squashes and Me and Me), 1984, which bears the caption "Soy adicto a mi" or "I am addicted to myself." (Galan's paintings are often full of such ambiguous phrases and nonsense rhymes, not to mention fanciful names and futuristic dates.)

In the realm of still life, Galan's flower paintings in particular symbolize his cultivation of a heady, fragrant, effeminate art. They become emblematic of a finicky, artisanal devotion to craft. The sharp-focus rendering of purple and white blossoms in Boy Crying Magnolias (1988) lends a Surreal early Magrittean air to what is essentially a later-day vision of the dandified artist as an homme aux camelias, literally on his knees praying amongst the flowers. This remarkable image, perhaps inspired by a reading of Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, is abruptly intercut with irregular areas depicting myriad tiny balls or coffee beans. The number "940," summarily inscribed in the upper-left comer of the canvas as if it were an item in an ambiguous catalogue, serves to stanch the mood of romantic pathos and remind us that this is merely one of the many images of the homme fatal. The most spectacular of these is Roma, 1990 (not in the Mexico City show), which shows a super-elongated vision of the sickly artist reclining under a minutely delineated crocheted coverlet which, toward the foot of the bed, starts to develop a fife of its own.