Press: "National Trilogy: Perspectives on Contemporary Mexican Painting"

What is Mexican painting today? To enter that vast territory, I propose a simple sample button. I chose the work of three Mexican painters, born between 1980 and 1990, because they go beyond technical conventionalisms and traditional modes of representation: they are processes of enormous technical skill, both materially and formally, relevant to our times. In all three cases we will see tensions between figuration and abstraction; in turn, memory and myth reappear as tropes; identity becomes inseparable from national history. First, the poetic archaeology of Abraham González Pacheco emerges from the collective memory of his community in the State of Mexico in order to subvert certain paradigms of Mexican muralism and reflect on rural imaginaries. For Alejandro Galván, Ciudad Neza is a post-apocalyptic song: his work digs through the ruins of yesterday and anticipates those of the future. Finally, the Oaxacan Bayrol Jiménez plunges into the unconscious to investigate with humor the foundational myths of the pre-Columbian past, in something we might call paranoid archaeology. Of course, we remain indebted to Mexican women painters, both cis and trans, as well as to hundreds of other artists of this generation who should appear in a truly exhaustive panorama—very different from this one.

Abraham González Pacheco

The work of Abraham González Pacheco (San Simón el Alto, Malinalco, 1989) is one of invocation and evocation. Invocation, because it involves the ritual act of addressing imaginary deities. Evocation, because it also calls his ancestors to mind. After a long period in which his work leaned toward installation, it was through an invitation to exhibit in the show Fábulas sin moraleja (2018) at Casa del Lago (UNAM) that Pacheco devised new techniques: a kind of frottage starting from a black graphite stain, in which the silhouettes and contours of figures were outlined with sandpaper that reveals the white ground, forming a vast landscape of Malinalco and Teotenango. Through frottage, he put forward a metaphor about corruption in Mexico: the material execution serves González to articulate a critique of the national temperament and the touristic exploitation of “pueblos mágicos.”

Abraham grew up in San Simón el Alto, a town of just under 3,000 inhabitants. The painter claims that his community was “spat out” by the Mexican Revolution. His family devoted almost their entire lives to agriculture. The aspirational discourse of the countryside and of progress shaped his life path. González recalls the radical changes in his town following the implementation of the Procampo and Solidaridad programs, as well as the arrival of drainage and potable water in the early 2000s. Returning to the landscape genre in mural form allows him to reflect on the idea of the horizon as a promise perpetually deferred for rural people. At the same time, it puts into crisis the configuration of the landscape and the order of the gaze governed by institutional order.

With a title worthy of a José Revueltas novel, El surco en la tierra (2020) marks a reconciliation with painting. This three-meter mural is divided, in turn, into 21 panels. It currently belongs to the Fundación M collection, an important archive that maps and offers an expressive panorama of contemporary Mexican art. For its production, Abraham mixed earth, binders, and pigments. Because each panel was made under different circumstances, the resulting tonalities were unexpected and some figurative features blurred or simply did not transfer. It was crucial to relinquish the artist’s mandate and allow accident and chance to do their work. Cracks, roughness, and craquelure cover the mural as if rain, exposure, and the passage of time had deteriorated it: a metaphor in itself of memory, which resists almost as much as our muscles and, in order to remain standing, forgets.

 

 

 

González Pacheco understands the mural as a space of fiction and play that allows him to recreate the history of his community from his own subjectivity. It is the act of erecting collective history from scratch: its myths, legends, and memories. A history for those who were unable to write their own. In questioning the idea of “public art,” Octavio Paz warned that the second phase of Mexican muralism became a vehicle for indoctrination that turned into a “national cult.”¹ Abraham subverts the paradigms of that rigid and politicized muralism by creating a detachable mural that invites its recombination with images derived from the unconscious, from dreams, and from memory.

Recurring figures in the mural, such as the serpent, symbolize fertility. Abraham recounts that seeing a snake in the field means the harvest will bear fruit. A magical and ritual act through the image, one that departs from Western logic and rationality, as Aby Warburg noted in his study of Pueblo Indian art.² In a single image, González condenses the evocation of childhood in the milpa and the invocation of nonexistent fork-tongued gods. Reptiles resurface in La lumbre de las serpientes (2023), a smaller-scale series marked by greater material experimentation. The series grows out of rubble found during his wanderings through Tepoztlán—fragments that later serve as supports for making concrete casts as improvised canvases. Once again, intuition and spontaneity dictate the act of creation. With no guide other than uncertainty and the inclemencies of the weather, the painter constructs a collective mythography from an archaeology of the self. Ultimately, the work of Abraham González Pacheco translates into images the vertigo of losing a center, the anguish of uncertain origins, and the instability of life on the periphery.

Alejandro Galván

The paintings of Alejandro Galván (Cd. Neza, 1990) are works of premonition and apocalypse. They are urban altars produced in his studio in his native Ciudad Neza. The emotional and combative intensity of his language stems from musical eclecticism. Death metal, black metal, charanga, salsa, punk, hip-hop: all these genres coexist within his painterly register, where noise and saturation determine the composition of each canvas. “My painting,” he states, “is not a denunciation; it is a real inhabiting of the place where I live.” And within that inhabiting he offers us a personal narrative, sordid and festive, in which desires and memories intertwine, delivering to the viewer a vast fresco that simultaneously serves as a living memory of his native Neza.

Galván’s work originates in an identity-based search marked by class consciousness forged during his years as a student at La Esmeralda: “there were realities you inhabited and thought were normal, and then you realize that you actually live in a zone without privilege.” The imaginary Galván foregrounds is none other than the Indigenous presence in cities, systematically excluded by dominant elites: deep Mexico, that of “la naquiza.”³ The term is emptied of its pejorative connotations and instead becomes a gesture of resistance and pride akin to Chicano brown pride.

In recent years, the support of Alejandro Galván’s works has consisted of cement panels adhered to large-format stretchers. His paintings are portable walls on which he unleashes his language, employing finely applied India ink with the remarkable skill of his brush, drawing from Flemish techniques. The compositional process of each piece begins with a digital collage that overlays photographs he himself captures during his wanderings through Neza. Taken together, the result is a baroque torrent of images that devours and cannibalizes all kinds of cultural codes: bestiaries, Christian iconography, Aztec symbols, Satanism, anime, sound-system culture, and esotericism. A bastard atlas of buchonas and street brawls, of small concerts and petty thieves. The desolate background landscape is composed of vacant lots, slaughterhouses, decaying concrete structures, and broken beer bottles, resulting in what might be called a malandra aesthetic.

 

 

Adatiel (2017–2022) is a central work in Galván’s production. It was exhibited last year at the Dutch gallery No Man’s Art; months later, at Zona Maco (2023) with Galería Furiosa. The viewer might think the painter tore a wall from the streets of the State of Mexico—that “huge gray stain,” in the artist’s words. Dominating the composition is a giant three-headed dog (an allusion to the quinametzin, the Mexica giants) with part of the lyrics of “¿Qué va a ser de él, Dios?” (1990), from the debut album of El Haragán y Compañía, tattooed across its back (“and there is a dog lying there in the street / in an advanced state of decomposition / and people pass by and look at it / and nobody says anything”). The rest of the textual and musical inscriptions—Napalm Death, Botellita de Jerez, and Brutales Matanzas—point to a strong affinity with counterculture, in José Agustín’s terms: all those “youthful, collective expressions that exceed, reject, marginalize themselves from, confront, or transcend institutional culture.”⁴

 

In Adatiel lie the vestiges of a torn spirituality: the Virgin of Sorrows blesses the bordering areas of Chimalhuacán and San Agustín—arid, abandoned, ungovernable zones. Below, famous and anonymous heroes serve as humorous counterpoints to endure the daily inferno, as in the case of “Vulgarcito,” a comedic character portrayed by Alejandro Suárez in Ensalada de locos. For Galván, “Vulgarcito” embodies what was always there but went unnoticed and, by identifying with him, he finds a way to “struggle with constant shames.” With the character’s wit and irreverence, Galván bets on a kind of art that has “neither shame nor fear.”

 

Yet Galván’s painting goes beyond being a mere clash of visual references. The collisions are, in any case, temporal planes: past, present, and future collapse into a single apocalyptic narrative. The rough and cracked texture of his concrete collages contributes to generating a certain effect of anachronism. This strategy becomes evident in the series Carne de ataúd (2022), a nod to the novel of the same name by Bernardo Esquinca. In it appear episodes from the national crime pages: from the San Juanico explosion to the 1985 earthquake, in a superimposition of disasters sealed by institutional negligence—events that did not go unnoticed by rock and protest song.⁵ Galván’s paintings illustrate the scars hidden within the walls of a city of festering wounds. Urban counterculture, already cemented as an aesthetic of resistance since the 1980s, returns in Galván’s images with a combative spirit against cultural impositions and the oppression of a Mexico to which we turn our backs.

 

Bayrol Jiménez

When looking at Bayrol Jiménez’s painting, a question hangs in the air: what is being Mexican if not a long hallucination? Like a chain of hallucinations, the painting of Bayrol Jiménez (Oaxaca, 1984) presents itself to our gaze. His pictorial language is grounded in drawing and movement, absorbing the morphology of graphic narrative and comics. Fugitives from a nightmare, his characters are chimeras that allude to national history. From his earliest phases, a complex relationship with figuration is visible, a back-and-forth between the figurative and the abstract. Even when he renounces literalness, he remains eloquent in addressing themes such as identity, tradition, and modernity.

 

In works such as Huachicoleros a partir del cuadro de François Millet (2019), elements from the European pictorial canon converge to comment on the country’s political situation. In this piece, the silhouette of a peasant is repeated in a sequence that creates the illusion of a man about to fall into the abyss. By reinterpreting the quintessential painter of rural realism, Jiménez captures the climactic moment of clandestine fuel tapping, which reached its peak after the explosion in Tlahuelilpan, Hidalgo.

 

The artist’s hand gradually frees itself from technical conventions. The line acquires its own expression, free of restrictions, and pure form becomes the discourse or modular meaning of the production. He achieves this initially through mnemonic drawing and automatism. The forms that intrigue the draftsman’s gaze are synthesized, geometrized, and compacted by grasping them solely through visual memory. This was the result of the exhibition Secuencias (2018) at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, whose central theme was the process itself, methodology, and the circularity or repetition of certain structures. Two factors determine the conceptualization of this series. On the one hand, sign painting (rótulo), a street practice Jiménez exercised in Oaxaca; on the other, the synthesis of simple strokes drawn from the semantic austerity of Iggy Pop’s songs. The process expands, bursts open, and gives way to altered states of consciousness; the act of drawing becomes trance, resulting in a palette that we could rightfully call psychedelic.

 

Geometric variations anticipate the pictorial production that Jiménez has resumed since 2021 as a “way of giving free rein to impulses.” In 2022, he developed a new series exhibited at Peres Projects (Berlin) based on the Spanish Conquest: News from the Netherworld. The strident explosion of color derives from the conquest accounts recorded by Gutierre Tibón in his Historia y fundación del nombre México. Tibón, who was a spiritualist and participated in mushroom-ingestion ceremonies, accurately reconstructed the series of omens and superstitions of the Mexica king Moctezuma: the long journey to Aztlán entrusted to sixty sorcerers and the expeditions to the underworld as a sacred physical and psychic practice brought about through mediumistic methods and the ingestion of psychotropics. Tibón states: “the journeys to the beyond as recounted by the sorcerers of both Moctezumas—the first to Chicomoztoc, the second to Cincalco—suggest that they knew how to combine hallucinations and mediumship: a convergence that merely imagining it sends chills down the spine.”⁶ Bayrol Jiménez reinterprets foundational myths through monstrosity, almost as if it were a B-movie (hence one of the paintings is titled Cannibal Holocaust), in an exercise of paranoid archaeology.

 

However, here the monstrous does not seek to generate fear. For Bayrol, the monstrous is merely the threshold of the unknown territories the hero crosses throughout his journey. Joseph Campbell pointed out the affinities between the psychoanalytic process and the mythical archetypes associated with the hero, affirming that “the regions of the unknown (deserts, jungles, deep seas, foreign lands, etc.) are a free field for the projection of unconscious contents.”⁷ The exhibition Artifact of Dreams (2022) generates an uncanny atmosphere of layer upon layer of dreamlike imagery; the monster disappears from the scene, yet the possibility of its return remains. The axis of the show revolves around imaginary fetish objects. The question of identity becomes blurred: dismembered bodies, organs, picnics of phalluses, and flora in an empty lot (Se vende terreno [2022]) predominate—tropes that point toward fecundity, toward a life-giving nature.

 

Monstrous imagination—Jiménez reminds us—can be creative and regenerative. Likewise, moving away from identity-based concerns signifies for the painter “a turn, an expansion.” Nevertheless, subtle glimpses of national iconography can be perceived in works such as Clairvoyance (2022). The case of the Oaxacan Bayrol Jiménez recalls that of the Guatemalan-Mexican Carlos Mérida (1891–1984), who negotiated a fluctuating identity between Maya K’iche’ heritage and cosmopolitanism, reflected in his language of abstracting indigenous forms, colors, and geometries and adapting them to Latin American modernity. By oscillating between figuration and abstraction, Bayrol narrates his own personal search.

 

Abraham, Alejandro, and Bayrol explore the rubble of the historical past to present us with images that help us understand the complexity of our present. While Jiménez investigates the paths through which ideas of nation and identity are forged as social constructs from distant times, González Pacheco exposes how that process remained unfinished decades ago, especially in rural sectors, like an uncompleted building. In musical terms, each one samples history, incorporating the lament of painful episodes now obliterated by collective amnesia; in Galván’s case, the sound of counterculture evokes the feeling of identity-based orphanhood experienced from the peripheries of Ciudad Neza. For all these reasons, in my view these three painters stand out and are consolidating their place within the national artistic scene.

 

Juan Pablo Ramos

Narrador y ensayista. Maestro en Letras por la UNAM, es autor de La mítika mákina de karaoke (2022).

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1 Paz, O. “Re/visiones: la pintura mural”, Obras completas, IV, Los privilegios de la vista. Arte moderno universal. Arte de México, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2014, p. 585.

2 Warburg, A. El ritual de la serpiente, trad. Joaquín Etorena Homaeche, México, Sexto Piso, 2004.

3 Bonfil Batalla, G. México profundo. Una civilización negada. México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2022, p. 90.

4 Agustín, J. La contracultura en México: La historia y el significado de los rebeldes sin causa: los jipitecas, los punks y las bandas, México, Grijalbo, 1996, p. 129.

5 Ver Anna Rose Alexander, "One Fire, Two Songs: Óscar Chávez and El Tri Sing about San Juanico, 1984", The Latin Americanist, vol. 64, no. 4, 2020, pp. 377-392.

6 Tibón, G. Historia del nombre y de la fundación de México, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993, p. 19.

7 Campbell, J. El héroe de las mil caras. Psicoanálisis del mito, trad. Luisa Josefina Hernández, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959, p. 51.