"The themes of my paintings are abstract. I play not with sorrow, but with the unknown, the occult, the mysterious, life and death, sex, frustrated love. I like to think that there’s an army of angels and other spirits that perhaps are helping me to concentrate, to give me the clue to the painting or the paintings, because there’s a point where it’s super difficult, when you need a click, only one and it’s precisely there where the work acquires it all."
--Interview with Luis Mario Schneider
Julio Galán is an enigma, a handsome, at times a beautiful young man whose image is seen fleetingly at times within his works, or in mysterious photographs like those of Graciela Iturbide. A beautiful handsome and complex young man, a painter caught in a gossamer web, spinning the images that fill his canvas. A web woven of the threads of his life, above all of the innocent and terrible, terrifying time, the beautiful and awesome time of the painter’s childhood. There in the web and in that time he continues to live, even as he grows and develops as a painter in a continuing present He moves between both times, a Janus looking back and forward, in full possession of both times and completely familiar with both.
These worlds find their way onto the canvas bordered and enhanced by the irregular squares he often employs which heighten tension or create planes and dimensions within the space. With an abrupt simultaneity, the sophisticated haunting, daring images of the world that he inhabits now and the nostalgic candor, the neo-romantic vision of supernal desires, lost, because perhaps they never were, come together jolting the viewer and eliciting a shiver. A strange sensation, a shivering response to something sensed and felt rather than understood. Visceral in their intensity, these paintings with their contrasting beautiful and touching representations scarred by long drips and blotches of color, ring with an energetic force that carries the viewer beyond the threshold of reason.
And because these works are drawn from and of Julio Galán, they are necessarily autobiographical, originating from a biography that reads like a magically real narrative. Galán was born into a family which owns lands and mines, in Músquiz, Coahuila in northern Mexico His precocious eye for the rare and the unusual seems to have come from his grandfather, a traveler and a collector. He would return from a trip with wonderful gifts for his grandson: on one occasion, a miniature member of the guards uniform like those of the guards at Buckingham Palace, another time, a sailor’s suit. Galán’s obsession for those objects with which he now fills his paintings, things like dogs, dolls, toys, fetishes, lace, roses, are his most important source, his touchstones of memory and of a time, his grandfather’s as well as his own. They are his magical amulets. They allow him to make his daring forays into territories formerly forbidden by the social strictures in Mexico, including gender crossing, and overt sexual references. They appear over and over throughout all of his paintings, in the defiant and contradictorily lyrical autobiographical narrative paintings in which he is the main character.
Schooled in Monterrey, an urban space of great tradition where the imprint of its founders who arrived four hundred years ago is still very much evident, he entered the university to study architecture. But the desire to paint won out. His first exhibitions were at the prestigious vanguard gallery in Monterrey, Guillermo Sepúlveda’s Galería de Arte Actual Mexicano (1980, 1982, 1983). Sepúlveda is the gallery owner credited for initiating the Monterrey arts renaissance. Fleeing to New York, he starved and painted and absorbed the city. After initial and cursory visits to museums and galleries, he never went again. Living in “Hells Kitchen,” his acquaintances were not artists but working-class people.
And surprisingly, he was sought out by the Art Mart Gallery for a show (1985) and the following year, for two shows, one at the Barbara Farber Gallery (Amsterdam, Holland), and the Page Powell and Edit Deak Gallery in Soho. Since then, there have been successes in Holland, New York, Paris (“Les Magiciens de la Terre” 1989, Centre Georges Pompidou) and solo shows there as well.
These seemingly different elements, the isolated formal and ceremonious reality of Mexico’s northern cities and the teeming, urban hardness of New York fuse together in these works that recall both a Mexican past in their baroque splendor as well as a postmodern dynamism.
There is a shift in the palette that Galán utilizes in these works. He focuses on shades of blues, grays and greens, a significant departure from his signature reds and ochre. But the layers of fantastic mythologies are still present, in landscapes and doll-like figures-personajes, all overlaid with cryptic words, splashes of paint, flowers, objects and images, apparent contradictions to the primary imagery of the painting.
A tiny image of a running or jumping figure keeps appearing, sometimes encircled as if part of a decorative surface pattern, as “Hold On,” or in black squares in “Old Paris” or simply overlaid as in “Carlos Felipe.” It is an abrupt contrast to the inherent representation within the work particularly in the two latter works. There, the painter continues to explore haunting mannequin-like figures who are either satirical parodies or apparitions, which fade in and out of the ground painting. Like Francis Bacon, Galán’s exploration of the distortion and deformity of the figure reveal an intuitive understanding of the fleeting quality of humanity, indeed of life itself particularly in “Carlos Felipe.”
In “Prepare to Meet Your God,” Galán’s daring sexual themes, so closely associated with his work become much more evident. Anatomical references invade the pastoral innocence of the landscape in an statement of the sexual here and now. Yet, even then this overt act of defiance to the purity of the image, seems to be charged with a childlike audacity, the brazen naughtiness of a precocious child. It embodies a candor that again reverts to the painter himself, the handsome child-man.the ultimate sophisticate, the heir to mythologies and metaphors that vicariously and inherently, originate from an entire century of experience through his own life and that of his milieu.
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