As a child, Roberto Gil de Montes relocated from Guadalajara to an East Los Angeles neighbourhood that was a growing centre of the Chicano movement. Reflecting his friendships with artists such as Carlos Almaraz, the paintings Gil de Montes began to produce after graduating from the Otis College of Art and Design employ fragmented narrative elements, lush colour, and extreme frontal compositions. His work revisits and reinvents tradition in equal measure, with frequent references to pre-Columbian and Huichol iconography – including creatures invested regionally with cosmological significance, such as dogs, jaguars, deer, and dancers – alongside the quotidian and oneiric experiences of his own life, and the occasionally perceptible stylistic influences of canonical Mexican Modernists including Rufino Tamayo and Frida Kahlo. The oil-on-linen painting El Pescador (2020) wryly queers Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–1486), with the part of its titular goddess, who famously emerges from a giant shell, played by a reclining young fisherman. Animation is suspended and fields of vision are unsettled in the paintings UP and El monje (both 2021), in which subjects are vertically inverted or seen through layers of rippling water. This is an imaginary of incongruity and colour where fidelity to the absurd and reverence for the humble clarify and illuminate with deceptive naïveté.
Ian Wallace
