Ana Segovia Wants You to Take Another, Closer, Look at that Cowboy
The Mexican painter is a master at directing viewers’ gaze. Now, he is using that power to turn gender roles and machismo upside-down.
by Ray Mark Rinaldi
Ana Segovia keeps close the worst painting he ever made. The work leans against a wall in a second-floor closet of the artist’s studio, located in San Pedro de los Pinos, a relaxed, working-class neighborhood in central Mexico City. It is the first thing visitors are shown.
Better to use men as subject matter, Segovia has learned, and now that is what he does almost exclusively, producing satirical takes on masculinity. This month, kurimanzutto will present a solo show of his work at Frieze London.
Segovia’s paintings tend to be simple in composition, often solitary figures set against sparse backdrops, and nearly all reference 20th-century cinema, particularly Westerns from the 1930s and 1940s. Some are actually painted directly from movies made in Mexico or the United States; others are appropriated from stills found online.
For the London fair, Segovia created a new body of work built around a cowboy character named Ramon, a “Mexican Marlboro Man,” as Segovia described him. A narrative runs through the series, though viewers need to work out the details themselves.
The paintings have descriptive titles, such as Ramon Eating an Apple and Ramon Playing the Flute. But there are no fruits or musical instruments in sight. Instead, Segovia presents a tight edit of Ramon’s body, focusing on the area between his hips and his knees. Viewers never see his face either, which makes a painting with the name Ramon Throwing a Rock a mystery that begs interaction. There is no rock.
By narrowing the visuals to the middle of the body, Segovia plays up the eroticism of the character. The focus is on Ramon’s butt and crotch, or his skintight jeans and his chaps, whose fringe and folds Segovia emphasizes by rendering them in a seductive, reflective reddish hue.
The move might be shocking if Segovia had not built up to it over the last decade of painting. He has learned how to focus on the details that matter, he said, to not waste time repeating mistakes — that terrible painting in the closet is a reminder of his core mission — and to understand how to help viewers see the important parts.
+ read more from the article by The New York Times