Working within isolation
ROBERTO GIL DE MONTES’ PAINTINGS CAPTURE OUR CURRENT DISTANCED STATES
EARLY LAST year, when the presence of a novel coronavirus plunged the world into hasty quarantine, Roberto Gil de Montes says he was transported to the early days of another pandemic.
“I remember AIDS,” he tells me via telephone from his home in Mexico, “going to visit friends and having to wear all of those masks and gear. That distance — it was something between us. It could be a wall or it could be a veil. It’s about being separated from people.”
This condition of apartness, of feeling unsettled and disembodied, is captured in a series of new paintings by the artist at Park View / Paul Soto in Los Angeles. Figures wash up on shores, drop from the sky or have their visages partly obscured by scrims or veils.
For Gil de Montes, 70, the works mark a return to the types of paintings he was making during that previous pandemic. (The screen is not a new motif for him.) But this latest series weaves in other uncertain conditions human bodies might suffer.
“I felt this whole thing about migration. I’d been thinking about people that walk these great distances and that take boats and drown,” he explains. “And I was thinking of the students from Ayotzinapa.”
He refers to the 43 Mexican teachers college students who were disappeared in 2014 in the town of Iguala with the involvement of local authorities. As of last year, the remains of only a handful of the young men have turned up.
Out of these preoccupations emerged works like “Boy on a River,” from 2020, which shows a male figure partly submerged along a shoreline.
“With Ayotzinapa, I didn’t want to wipe blood all over the canvas,” says Gil de Montes. But he wanted to acknowledge what was initially thought to have been the students’ final resting place: a river. (Since then, investigations have turned up remains near a garbage dump at the town of Cocula, about 12 miles away.) “The body that is resting on the river ... it’s not what happened, but it’s what came to me.”
Gil de Montes was born in Guadalajara but lived in L.A. starting at age 13. He had regular, well-reviewed exhibitions at galleries such as Lora Schlesinger and Jan Baum. About 20 years ago, he and his partner began spending more and more time in the small, coastal village in Nayarit, which he has frequented for 33 years. The extended visits grew to become permanent. “Here I don’t have any distractions,” he says. “I can spend more time with my painting. The main attraction of the day is being in the studio. I walk here and it’s 15 minutes. Everything is 15 minutes — including the ocean and the jungle.”
The remote location doesn’t mean he is disconnected. In fact, the artist’s profile seems to be growing. Last year, he joined the stable at the prominent Mexico City gallery Kurimanzutto. In May, he opened his solo show at Park View / Paul Soto, his first solo show in Los Angeles in more than three years.
Says Gil de Montes: “It’s a good time for me.”