🌎 ESPAÑOL // ENGLISH
Autotheory with Headache (2021)
In 1985, Julio Galán imagined a new decoration for these subway corridors in his work Stroll Through New York with a Headache and a Lottery Deck. Yet rather than recounting a planetary narrative, the artist presents stories emerging from his inner world and his experience of the city, extending far beyond the walls of the underground. Drawing upon the iconography of the traditional Mexican lottery game, Galán recreated the urban landscape of his liberating New York, generating an early reflection on and from exile. In the encounter between national symbolism and the cityscape of his adopted home, the young painter began exploring the contradictions of his uprooted roots as a means of recognizing and reconstructing himself in a new place.
Stroll Through New York... is one of the first works Galán produced after arriving in the United States. The painting is composed of multiple views in which the artist inserts characters, objects, and scenes from the lottery cards into the horizon of New York City, creating small tableaux laden with symbolism. Along the sides and lower edge, underground scenes, subway cars, storefront-lined streets, and the interior of a museum form a kind of frame for the central image: a self-portrait among skyscrapers. This type of composition, in which the central figure appears trapped or enclosed, recurs throughout Galán’s work, appearing in earlier paintings such as Sofía’s Wardrobe (1983) and later works such as Trapped in the Elevator (1991). In Stroll Through New York..., however, it is the artist himself who is confined within the city’s canyons while his body somatizes the strains of metropolitan life.
By unfolding the imagery of the lottery game beyond the deck itself, Galán transforms it into a toolbox that can be associated with both Pop Art and Surrealism. In this way, the symbolic implications of his work are not limited to references to Mexican culture but are made accessible to an international audience. In this sense, the term Neo-Mexicanism has succeeded in inserting his work into a global institutional circuit of visual production, though it fails to encompass the full complexity of his artistic practice. To this day, Galán continues to resist being confined by the oppressive ideological apparatuses involved in the construction of art history. As a result, more intersectional readings have emerged, complicating the identity labels used to define the artist, his characters, and his work.
Among recent reassessments of his practice, approaches concerned with gender construction and representations of sexual dissidence have reclaimed an aspect that was largely overlooked in early interpretations of his work. Drawing upon queer theory—or, more accurately, queer theories—these readings have enriched understandings of Galán through a conception of identity as fluid, open, and perpetually under construction. Morelio is one example of this. From the perspective of the exhibition, it is particularly fruitful to revisit Galán’s move to New York, a pivotal moment in both his artistic and personal history. Migration thus becomes another facet that both shapes—and is shaped by—that identity in formation. Moreover, migration from Mexico to the United States follows a highly specific logic informed by the complex geographical, cultural, diplomatic, and political relationship between the two countries.
Stroll Through New York... illustrates, in almost cinematic fashion, some of the anxieties produced by the condition of being an immigrant. At the center of the canvas, a colossal Galán makes his way through the skyscrapers, dressed in a yellow guayabera-like shirt patterned with “the Shrimp” and “the Fish,” and wearing a hat adorned with “the Skull.” The artist portrays himself as a kind of King Kong in uniform, much larger than the city and yet simultaneously intimidated by its noises, lights, and smells. Above the rooftops, “the Mermaid” and “the World” appear as billboards advertising an exotic, temperate vacation dream as an alternative to the harshness of the polar vortex. In the sky, “the Moon,” “the Sun,” and “the Star” are swallowed by the dark blue background, reminding us that however much it vibrates and shines, New York is also dark and incomprehensible.
Despite the monumentality of the figure, the city grid and its towering buildings become a labyrinth of obstacles. At night, under blinding lights, it is always more difficult to read street names. Galán thus appears as a confused wanderer, closer to a zombie than to a flâneur. With one hand on his forehead, he takes his temperature; with the other, he carries “the Heart.” At the same time, he touches his chest to confirm that he has not become one of the living dead and that his heart is still beating. He is alive—it is only a severe migraine, the kind that comes from thinking too much in two languages.
Galán’s headache can be interpreted as an allegory for the strange and complex operations of the bilingual brain. Communication between two languages is another binary relationship anticipated as rigid in theory but remarkably flexible in practice. It is also a condition that entails an identity crisis for anyone striving to reconcile multiple ways of being in the world and communicate them through a single voice. Beyond this migraine, the complexity of flexible binaries appears in other exercises of self-representation, such as Cat Eyes (1992), Untitled (Double Self-Portrait) (1991), and Everything Really Happens (n.d.). In the latter, in particular, one finds the phrase “I am not I. I am I,” written in capital letters in the upper-right corner and accompanying two moments in which Galán’s face is either veiled by shadows or covered by a mantle. Another recurring strategy in his work lies in this tension between revealing himself and withholding himself, creating the possibility of being one person at times and someone else at others.
The small scenes along the margins of Stroll Through New York... offer additional layers of information about Galán’s migratory experience. At the bottom of the painting, “the Lady” browses shops displaying “the Copper Pot,” “the Boot,” and “the Guitar,” while “the Dandy” follows her down the street. This composition evokes representations of Mexican culture that promote a particular form of nationalism made available for foreign consumption and may even be read as a self-critical premonition. To the right, inside a museum, “the Canoe” and “the Rooster” form part of a kind of diorama beside which hangs a painting of “the Flowerpot.” It is important to note that the nature of the exhibition space is never fully defined, opening the possibility that these objects are being displayed either as ethnographic artifacts at the AMNH or as Mesoamerican artworks at the MET. They could even belong to the collection of MoMA, sharing space with works by Galán’s contemporaries such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Robert Mapplethorpe. These possibilities also resonate with Galán’s relationship to objects, a well-known and almost obsessive dynamic that moved between accumulation and collecting.
On the left-hand side, an underground scene can be read as a sexualized encounter, reflecting one of the forms of liberation Galán was able to explore outside Mexico. As the subway approaches, “the Brave Man” and “the Little Devil” exchange glances that seem to foreshadow a sexual encounter. In addition to alluding to movements of sexual dissidence emerging at the time, the scene references New York as one of the epicenters of the HIV/AIDS crisis. In keeping with the codes of communication used for flirting and consent, this theme, as in other works by Galán, appears subtly, secretly, and playfully.
Confronting the conservatism that permeated Mexico during the 1980s, Galán sought to challenge the normative parameters imposed by the Mexican state, Catholicism, and the nuclear family, while exploring the construction of identity as a complex, multiple, and ever-changing process. Revealing some of the layers that composed his reality and his experience of the world, in Stroll Through New York... Galán painted the city’s many faces—the face of skyscrapers and cultural exchange, but also that of illness and confusion. Like “the Bird” from the lottery deck that accompanies him on his flight from south to north, Galán found in New York a place large enough to contain himself and all of his versions. After all, the bigger the apple, the bigger the worms.
(1) I am grateful to Daniel Garza Usabiaga for sharing ideas and questions that contributed to the formulation of this argument.
“Paseo por Nueva York con dolor de cabeza y barajas de lotería”, 1984, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 198 × 152 cm