Art
Emily Steer
Portrait of Roberto Gil de Montes by Antonio Nabor. Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto.
On the surface, Roberto Gil de Montes’s languid paintings seem to present an image of paradise. He depicts individuals and groups of men in lush natural settings, surrounded by abundant tropical plants or connecting with wild animals. For instance, El Pescado (2020)—a standout piece in “The Milk of Dreams” at the 2022 Venice Biennale—features a topless young fisherman lounging in a giant clam shell, a play on Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1485–86) that challenges heteronormative stereotypes. But serene as they seem, many of Gil de Montes’s works are punctured by surprising moments of violence.
“I portray a sense of calm, but when I look at my work, I feel there is some sort of detachment,” said the artist in an interview ahead of his solo show, “Reverence in Blue,” on view at kurimanzutto in New York from November 9th through December 22nd. “The main image for the exhibition is a guy lying down in a fishing boat, but when you look at the boat, it’s broken. When I first painted it, the boat was on top of a grave, but I took it out.…I like the idea of death lurking.”
Roberto Gil de Montes, Wrecked, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York.
After a prolific and consistent 50-year career, largely overlooked by the mainstream art world, Gil de Montes is now gaining global acclaim. While his works often transport viewers to vibrant, fantastical locations, they are informed by political and social events, such as the global struggle for LGBTQ+ rights and the turmoil he has witnessed within his country of origin. “In Mexico, we have constant news of students disappearing, being murdered and burnt. They just discovered a grave with 40 bodies. We tend to become immune to the pain once it’s happened over and over again.”
The 2023 documentary Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate was a disquieting source of inspiration for “Reverence in Blue.” The film, Gil de Montes explained, portrays the freedom of a queer nightclub in 1920s Berlin, which was destroyed by the Nazis’ rise to power. “Berlin in the 1920s was just as open as I felt the U.S. is now,” he said. “But they ran into the Nazis and, suddenly, they were repressed. I realized that could happen now, and that really frightened me.” This led him to explore his own experiences growing up as a gay child in Mexico in the 1950s and early ’60s, and then following his move to Los Angeles with his family as a teenager.
Roberto Gil de Montes, Untitled, ca. 2006–08. Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto Mexico City / New York.
He stayed in California in young adulthood, and in his early career became part of the Chicano movement of the 1970s, working alongside artists such as Carlos Almaraz. It’s a group the artist is still involved with, and in 2022 he participated in “L.A. Memo: Chicana/o art from 1972-1989” at La Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles. But after all this time, he says, the art world has difficulty seeing him as Mexican and American. “At that time, we were fighting for our civil rights, our place in the world,” he said. “And the U.S. is still unwilling to accept that immigrants are Americans and should have the same rights and interests. Cultural diversity enhances our world, but the idea that foreigners stay foreigners is really ingrained in U.S. culture.”
Death and dreams have always had a central place in Gil de Montes’s paintings, in which disembodied heads float and men cavort with dangerous big cats. It is perhaps due to these two elements that many have often seen his work as aligned with Surrealism. “When I started showing as an artist, my first review in the Los Angeles Times said that I was a very scary artist,” he laughed. “The press always asks: ‘How do you feel? Are you Mexican? Are you American?’ I have to say: ‘I am Mexican, I am American, I am an immigrant, I’m gay, I’m Chicano,’ all these things. And now I’m a Surrealist!”
Roberto Gil de Montes, Marcelo, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto Mexico City / New York.
While he didn’t initially feel an affinity with the final label, he does acknowledge a similarity between the warping of reality in his paintings and in those of the Surrealists: “I never considered myself a Surrealist, but one day, I thought, ‘Of course you’re a Surrealist! There are severed deer heads floating in the sky [in your works].’ I started laughing to myself.”
Gil de Montes’s works seem to exist outside of time, as he draws connections between contemporary desires and struggles and the creative expressions of the past. His paintings are layered with history, depicting fragments of pre-Columbian pottery found within La Peñita, the fishing town on the Pacific coast of the Mexican state of Nayarit, where he moved 14 years ago.
Roberto Gil de Montes, Boy Deer, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto Mexico City / New York.
“I remember being 11 years old, and there was a vendor selling fruit in my neighborhood,” he said, explaining that the vendor, in Guadalajara, had several pots and ceramic works by Indigenous artists under his cart. “I bought that instead of the fruit. It made me very inquisitive.” These ceramics speak to the history of his current environment, as well as the shared creativity that moves across geographical lines. He is interested in how similar symbols and forms can be shared by distant cultures. “Humanity is amazing. That’s why I can’t understand the violence,” he said. “I think we’re disconnecting now, but at one point there were a lot of similarities.”
While some artists highlight the horrors of climate change by showing the destruction of the natural world, Gil de Montes presents it as luscious and beautiful, unspoiled by industry. His water is vivid blue, vegetation grows in abundance, and people seem at one with animals. In celebrating nature, he shows what we risk losing through recklessness. These scenes are loosely inspired by his current surroundings and his love of gardening.
Roberto Gil de Montes, Farewell, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto Mexico City / New York.
“I’m on my fifth garden,” he said. “I don’t have the time to spend there anymore, but I have someone who helps me. When I hired him, I told him, ‘I want you to know that I really want your job!’ When you’re in the garden, it puts you in touch with your real self. I wouldn’t be able to paint the environment in disarray. There is so much, and it’s all been ruined by greed.”
Through his work, the artist revels in the potential of the world around him while deeply fearing for its future. “I’m 73 years old, I’m really at the end of this,” he said. “My worry is that it’s going to get worse. The world is in a few hands; how could it be? How could that happen and how can people live with themselves? It’s a very strange world now.”
