Right now no one in Mexico is painting like Daniel Lezama is. His world in representational strokes is a fully resolved, fully horrifying vision of a Mexico beheaded. A brutal and naked Mexico, a carnival of cell phones and homicidal clowns, a nation in ritual rebirth. Lezama paints madness by the skin of the maguey.
That his work doesn't cause more of a stir in the public sphere is perhaps a welcome sign in this dark bicentennial year. Mexico might be drowning in its own blood, but at least the artists are still allowed to take the stains and spread them around on canvas, still wet.
Above, a detail from a Lezama (in full view: "La gran noche mexicana," 2005) at a show just inaugurated at the MUNAL. The exhibit is a blandly nationalist thing they titled "Imagenes de la Patria." Yes, the man with the microphone above is Juan Ga. One piece by another artist, in the Age of Arizona, proposes a cholo guadalupano refashioning of the United States flag. See here. It is by Adolfo Patiño, 1998, and called "Proyecto para la bandera de una colonia mexicana."
* Previously, "Control your magic."
** It's vacation time. Intersections now takes another breather, and will check in shortly from Puebla, Oaxaca, Tijuana/San Diego, and Los Angeles.