Julio Galán, Sí y no, 1990. Acrylic and collage on canvas (Diptych), 120 1/8 x 203 1/8 inches. © Julio Galán. Courtesy the Galán family, kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York, and Luhring Augustine, New York. Photo: Farzad Owrang.
“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.
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