Jesús Lugo

Plenitudes and voids in the work of Jesús Lugo

by Esteban García Brosseau (june, 2021)

There is no doubt about it: there is something obsessive about the work of Jesús Lugo. If not, how could we explain the almost infinite number (limited only by the frame of the painting) of varied characters that animate most of his canvases? By seeing them, one tends to ask oneself what is the reason for these crowds that, seen from afar, could almost evoke the shapes of an abstract painting due to their composition and color? We are, however, standing in front of a figurative work, which brings us naturally to look attentively at each of the individuals that are here portrayed collectively, as it happens with the paintings of Bosch, Breughel and, perhaps even more, with the descendants of the latter, Jan Brueghel the Elder and the Younger. Thus, the affinity of Lugo with Flemish painters, becomes evident from the first moment, even if he is himself a painter of the 21st century.

The characters which are thus portrayed by Lugo are diverse. Sometimes it is just common people: a man here, a woman there, a young lady with her yellow sweatshirt farther away ; but, beside them, we may see simultaneously a prostitute in garters, a couple making love without any pudor, naked women in more or less obscene positions who sometimes reign at the center of the composition as tantric goddesses….The canvass, from a collective portrait, would thus tend to become an orgy, if it wasn’t for the solitude in which each of the characters thus portrayed seems to be confined, which makes that tendency impossible: all of this characters, who are depicted by Lugo with the precision that his predilection for drawing allows him, do not seem to establish any bonds between them, or very few at least

Instead, they seem to be imprisoned within their own singularity: the crowds that are shown to us by Lugo do not seem to be connected to each other by sharing a common cause (a party, a celebration, a manifestation), but seem caught instead in the net of solitudes woven by civilizations; not only ours, but also past ones, whether Prehispanic, African or Asian, as can be seen by the multiple subjects of this work, in which the spectator sees successively passing before his eyes Buddhist Asia (with Buda being tempted, as was Saint Anthony, by the demon Mara and his hosts of women), the Nymphéas (and Nymphs) of Monet’s garden at Giverny, a great Mexica plaza that recalls somehow the Prehispanic Mexico of the muralists (although including a European queen that dominates the scene with a couple of female courtesans pornographically submitted at her feet as well as a viceregal gentleman who wanders in the middle of the scene as in Villalpando’s La Plaza Mayor de México), modern cities similar to Mexico City as it was depicted by O’Gorman, but in which an anachronism always appear here and there, as to show that all periods are equivalent. In general, by passing from one painting to the other we may see appearing, in the middle of a modern crowd, a medieval peasant woman, a noble lady from the 16th century, Francis I, a Renaissance Pope, a bourgeois from the 17th or the 18th century, all of which, remind us that Lugo’s work is mainly a dialogue with the history of art, in which his own preferences predominate.