José Luis Sánchez Rull

The work of José Luis Sánchez Rull rests on an insistence sustained over decades: painting as his sole medium and, within it, the refinement of a figurative language of his own. Like other Mexican artists across generations, he received his first sentimental education facing the United States, with the partial access and fragmentary view that the era imposed. That learning is now the subsoil of his practice, a deposit in which the upper and lower strata of both countries' cultures lie superimposed.

Trained at Pratt Institute in New York in the 1980s, at the height of the return to painting, Sánchez Rull assimilated the lesson, by then ubiquitous, of the California scenes—underground comix, lowbrow, punk—that had eroded the hierarchy between high and low. That crossing gives rise to the negotiation that forms the backbone of his production: on the one hand, a devotion to old masters such as Rembrandt or Goya; on the other, a consciousness of belatedness—the certainty that this heroic past is irrecoverable—which compels him to set for himself the terms of whatever transcendence is still possible. The result is a double lineage: Romantic, insofar as he interweaves his biography with the grand formal gestures of the tradition; punk, insofar as he channels the rawness of comics, of pornography, and of the body's most elemental drives.

For the past twenty years, the artist has been based in Tláhuac, in southeastern Mexico City, a territory of pre-Hispanic and lacustrine heritage where the communal ways of life of its inhabitants resist the advance of urban sprawl. With his studio set beside a cemetery, he absorbs the density of this historical and social fabric and translates it into his pictorial vocabulary: there, the archetypes of the Western canon clash with the reality of his immediate surroundings. Rather than illustrate narratives, his painting interrogates the emotions and primary affects unleashed by that collision of images.