Calling Jesus Trinidad Villalpando the “Mexican Basquiat” could be seen as facile and lazy, but damned if an exhibition of his work sponsored by the state government and housed in the gracefully colonnaded 17th-century Ex-Convento del Carmen in downtown Guadalajara doesn’t make pointing out the parallels between the two artists irresistible.
Guadalajara native Villalpando – also known as Feng – has been fascinated by art since the age of five. He credits the graffiti seen crawling all over the decrepit edifices of his birth city as an early inspiration. It’s an influence readily descried in his work, which uses tradition oil paint, spray paint and less conventional materials such as vinyl and nail polish.
While it’s unknown to this writer whether or not Villalpando identifies Jean-Michel Basquiat, a darling of the 1980s New York art scene who died of a drug overdose at 27, as an influence, he’s no doubt heard the comparison being made enough to be thoroughly sick of it. But it’s there, nonetheless.
For one, both artists worked extensively out-of-doors – using the city as their canvas – and neither made any attempt to hide that milieu’s impact on their work.
Also, like Villalpando, Basquiat used a nickname, Samo (short for “same old shit”), a tag seen all over Manhattan at the time which he shed after hitting it big, snorting caviar and cracking lobster tails with solid gold pinchers and Andy Warhol in lower Manhattan’s most expensive temples of fine dining.
A method used by both artists is the incorporation of words into their work, although Basquiat tended towards the cryptic, while Villalpando’s statements are fairly blunt, an example being his painting “La Misma Mierda de Siempre” – a collaboration with fellow artist Manuel Rodriguez. This phrase, written in lurid, noxious yellow on the black shawl of a demonic nun, translates as “same old shit.” It’s hardly a stretch to suspect the painting may be an homage.
Villalpando, however, does Basquiat one better in terms of directly tying his work to street art by actually tagging with spray paint the pristine white walls of his exhibit’s temporary home, the lines meandering haphazardly where they may, even straying over the small white title placards fixed next to each work – a thumb in the eye of the conventional ghettoization of art within the boundaries of a canvas.
Villalpando’s artistic plainspokenness, together with a more direct, even decorative (a word whose usage in the art world could get a full paint can whipped at your head) visual aesthetic, is something he doesn’t share with the Big Apple’s tragic, dreadlocked artistic icon, whose difficult, mercurial work was almost as dense with references from art, history, music, politics and literature as a James Joyce novel. And while the graffiti on the walls of the Ex-Convento may imply the inextricable link between his work in the street with that of the art gallery, he sees the two sides to his work and personality as mutually distinct.
“The first [artistic identity] is Feng, the decorative urban artist,” explained the painter on Jalisco’s Ministry of Culture website. “The second is Jesus Villalpando, an expressionist commenting on contemporary society. I like the spontaneous guerrilla energy when I’m in the street; in the museum I’m more of a perfectionist.”
A video installation in a cramped narrow space between two larger rooms of the exhibit indicated a whimsy not often associated with the work of Basquiat. The video, called Especial 4.20, consists of a stop-motion animation depicting a paint-spattered Mr. Potato Head as a tortured artist laboring over several canvases in his threadbare studio, all to a soundtrack of early nineties hip-hop. It’s refreshingly self-deprecating, like a gust of wind dispelling the stale, flatulent pretentiousness that often hangs in art gallery air.
“My painting is natural,” mused Villalpando in an interview with Guadalajara publication La Voz. “When I paint, I don’t have a specific methodology and I don’t have a routine. I paint alone, with music, coffee, color and fun.”
The exhibition at the Ex-Convento (Av. Juarez 635) ends September 24. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Free entry.
Keep an eye out for his work around the city streets, including a recently executed work depicting an apoplectic Trump on Nueva Galicia, cross street unknown.