Nahum zenil biography definition
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How do we call what we have not yet named? In the first wave of criticisms of his work, nudity was placed before the rest of the themes, which remained in the background, as if body figuration and context could be dissociated. I remembered seeing old yellowed postcards and letters and I wanted my work to have those same characteristics. His work continues to challenge conventions of representation while affirming the power of printmaking as a vehicle for both intimacy and universality.
"Silence is the backbone of all my work", stated Nahum B.
Zenil in 1995.[1] The mutest sound, and at the same time, the noisiest one, becomes the bone structure of a pictorial and literary work that has marked an iconographic milestone in the Mexican art scene. Repetition is the message, a repetition to unlink Mexicanness from normative patterns, by including Zenil’s discourse within it. Zenil's work manages to connect a kind of unity or identity shaped by the trinity of the nation, religion, and homosexual desire.
[1] Cristina Pacheco, “Between Sexuality and Guilt (Entre la curiosidad y la culpa),” in Nahum B.
Zenil. Writing, a refuge for introspection and loneliness, is also a medium that has accompanied the artist since his youth, as his poetry reflects.
The viewer, contrary to what might seem, is not a voyeur, nor is the artist an exhibitionist or a narcissist. Recently, critical theory towards his work has been expanded with the analysis of the scholar Sofía Solís, whose thesis informs this article.
He becomes one more in the tide of people that inhabit the Mexican metropolis. His first years passed surrounded by the sound of the rain and the sound of rumors. Witness to the Self, Testigo del Ser (The Mexican Museum, 1996), 29.
[2] Edward J. Sullivan, “Witness to the Self (Testigo del Ser),” in Nahum B.
Zenil.
Horses, angels, religious figures, and architectural fragments often appear alongside his own likeness, creating visual allegories that examine desire, mortality, and faith. In works such as Otro Sueño and other prints from the 1980s and 1990s, eroticism and spirituality coexist, suggesting both tension and reconciliation between body and spirit.
Zenil emerged during a period when Mexican art was expanding beyond the muralist tradition, embracing more personal and experimental voices.
He was born in the family ranch on the first day of the year 1947. Solís' interpretation no longer only analyzes the artist's work from the context of Mexican nationalism, but also includes a genealogy of the homosexual movement in Mexico. That of being the symbolic son of Christ himself and of the Virgin.
Suddenly, the ranch becomes silent. His work weaves threads that connect his being and his identity to the place and culture where he grew up. According to Solís, the artist's self-portrait and the repetition of his identity is a message in itself. It is a no-frills message that shows what our eyes had been denied. Silence becomes present when we name it.
Quoting the author of this theory:
Nahum B. Zenil's painting is presented as a plastic depiction that critiques the model of heterosexuality linked with the definition of national identity. This 2013 dissertation answers the question posed by Sullivan in his essay at the end of the nineties of the last century: “The element that resides in the most recesses of Zenil's imagery is the constant dilemma of how to define, with visual analogies, his position as a gay man in the Mexican society of his time."[6] According to Solís, it is precisely the reiteration that defines this position.