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

Art in America, July, 1994 by Brooks Adams

In the '90s work, Galan shows every sign of becoming adept at hyperrealistic still life and portraiture, the kind of Latin American art we associate more usually with neo-traditionalist painters such as Claudio Bravo. Retrato de Luisa (Portrait of Luisa), 1990, is a tour-de-force of Magic Realist details, including the gauzy handkerchief that sits on top of a bowl of green grapes and the equally gauzy drapery suspended from a black hoop hanging miraculously in midair. All this may be said to depict the dreams of the girl who sleeps with her head on the table; what remains more ambiguous is the portent of the meandering faux-wood-grain line that significantly frames the image of a carte de visite. Similarly, a painted vase of coxcombs is so meticulously rendered that it almost becomes an implied male protagonist. (In Quanto falta [How Much is Lacking?] of 1990, a real bouquet of coxcombs is attached to the canvas in roughly the same spot, making the levels of artifice and realism all the more complex.)

In a show of such relentlessly outrageous self-portraiture, the few signs of restraint, even of incipient old-masterish conservatism, came as something of a relief. Although I was impressed by the bold, graphic conceit of Los siete climas (The Seven Climates), 1991, in which the artist depicts himself in a black-and-white striped Indian skirt, feather headdress and body paint against an Op-art ground, I began to find his increasingly exaggerated histrionics of self a bit cloying. (A suite of photographic self-portraits in the catalogue, including one that shows Galan in the costume of Los siete climas, struck me as particularly over-the-top.)

For all the images of mortification of the flesh in Galan's art, this show, in its Mexico City incarnation, was remarkably low on explicit homoerotic imagery. In Corazon mental (Mental Heart), 1992, I spotted collaged Polaroids of a male nude spread-eagled on a bed, his identity effectively disguised by Galan's cutting and splicing of the photographs. Yet missing from the show were such explicit works as the pastel Anal y Isis (1992), with its fine of two male nudes in bondage, which was part of the 1992 Stedelijk retrospective.

The piece de resistance of homoerotic candor in the Mexico City exhibition was Pensando en ti (Thinking about You), 1992, a large painting of a male nude asleep in a chair with his hands over his crotch and wearing only schoolboyish brown shoes with white socks. Hung alone at the entrance to the show with sweeping stairs on either side leading up to the main exhibition space, the painting made a strong case right off the bat for oneiric beauty and homosexual acceptance. It is, of course, an idealized self-portrait, as well as a dream image of wish-fulfillment, with both the self and its ephebic Other (the "you" of the title) fused in a single anatomy. It is also a remarkable exercise in trompe l'oeil rendering: the filmy stripes of an abstract field painting appear to pass over the carefully wrought nude, and a welter of tachiste scrawls across the surface make the painting look as if it had been violently defaced. Here, in a single image, is the whole breathtakingly random murality of Mexico, both ancient and modem, figurative and abstract.