In February 2020, during Mexico City’s art week, Ana Segovia staged an intervention in La Faena, a cantina downtown not far from the Zocalo. At one end of the bullfighting-themed bar hangs a large painting of a man holding a red cape as he crawls through a barbed wire fence into a pastoral landscape filled with bulls. Segovia painted an almost one-to-one replica of the work in his signature, decidedly femme palette, somewhere between neons and pastels. In Segovia’s version, the man’s red cape is white, and he holds a rose while donning a salmon sweater and a baseball cap.
The cantina’s regulars had strong reactions to the way Segovia glammed up the local watering hole. Segovia sat in the bar and “got to listen to people who hated it, who loved it,” he told me during a visit to his studio in a Porfiriato-era building in Mexico City, describing this and other works as “site-specific.”
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The bull fighter is one of several toxic tropes of hyper-masculinity that Segovia, who works across painting, video, and performance, deconstructs in his work. Another frequent trope is the charro, or Mexican cowboy. For a 2020 solo exhibition at Galería Karen Huber in Mexico City, a 26-foot mural, Paisaje (2022), served as the backdrop for a performance, choreographed by Diego Vega Solorza, in which dancers, hidden behind a curtain, moved their cowboy boots in unison, before ultimately devolving into a nude dog pile.
Segovia, who will feature in the main exhibition of this year’s Venice Biennale and have a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles this fall, is best known for his paintings that translate black-and-white film stills, both from Hollywood and Mexico’s Golden Ages, into canvases he described during our visit as “poppy, kitschy, campy, bubblegum colors.” Many feature all-male gatherings; others show a man trying to woo a woman; while still others display men in moments of supposed heroism, rescuing damsels in distress. He says the colors “gave me permission to sort of fetishize the masculinity without being too serious about it.”
Segovia’s obsession with film comes from being a “frustrated filmmaker and a cinephile,”but also from his own familial connection to the industry. His great-grandfather, Fernando de Fuentes of the Revolution Trilogy (1933–36), is considered one of Mexico’s most important early filmmakers, and his grandfather, Fernando de Fuentes Reyes, was a producer who married the actress Yolanda Varela—one of the country’s biggest stars during Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema. These early films were aimed at creating a new national identity based in convenient and often sanitized versions of history—“it’s that sort of artificiality about how we tell stories” that Segovia wants to dissect in his paintings.
In Venice, Segovia has adapted his 2021 solo show, at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, that featured paintings alongside his first video work. In the Biennale, that video, Aunque Me Espine la Mano, is projected onto a screen at the center of the room—painted a neon pink to transform it into a “burlesque, draggy, campy space.” In this colorful six-minute video, two charro figures, dressed in corresponding electric pink and blue embroidered suits, take center stage. You never get a clear look at their faces, and their genders are intentionally ambiguous. The figures dress each other, then slap one another’s hands and then faces, then one violently shakes the other. There’s a growing violence in the latent eroticism, buoyed by their grunting, in each exchange. Segovia embraces the ambiguity of their gestures: “I’m not proposing new masculinities or utopias,” he said. “It’s not prescriptive. It’s not getting at any answers.”