The Loose Pages of Memory: The Pictorial Work of Nahum B. Zenil between Corporeity and Self-representation

Abstract

The pictorial work of the Mexican artist Nahum B. Zenil represents an important precursor of openly homosexual art in Mexico. The corporeity and the autobiographical elements represent the privileged subjects of his works and become the battlefield of a fight against the discrimination of minorities and the main object of psychological and erotic self-analysis. This research aims to analyze the work of the Veracruz painter in search of the elements that link him to the national and international artistic currents of the past, in relation to the representation of the male body, and the legacy that he is leaving for the new generations of creative queer Mexicans. His proposal, fed by myths and personal or collective symbologies, was raised from the beginning to challenge the hegemonic vision of history and heteropatriarchal male models. In Zenil's work, time, in a linear, cyclical or suspended sense, is the medium in which the intersectional identity of the painter is constructed, reconstructed and traversed through the psychoanalytic tools of the mask, the myth and the mirror; That allow him to adopt an infinite variety of new characters, the sum of which forms a unique personal archive due to its exceptional nature and at the same time brings him closer to the field of so-called queer ecology and post-porn. The richness of this artistic proposal takes Nahum B. Zenil beyond the framework of Neo-Mexicanism, in which he never fully recognized himself, to recognize him as the multidisciplinary and innovative artist that he is