Painting Chaos: Myth, Freedom, and Revelation in the Art of Julián Madero

by Bárbara Caro

Entering Julián’s universe, unhurried, as if asking for permission. In one tab: paintings; in another, drawings with text—ah, the drawings. Many open, visceral, courageous drawings, completely vulnerable. Phrases that compose the whole, a dance between figures and text. Phrases like spears—direct, straightforward, incisive, and structural.

A former professor of mine used to say Imalabras (a combination of two spanish words: imágenes, images, palabras, words), the perfect symbiosis between images and words. That’s how I begin to observe…



I read that you said painting is an attempt to bring order to chaos. How do you relate to chaos?

(I see it as) taking a photograph of your mental state, something like that—being able to take stock. And I feel that chaos is chaotic while you're immersed in it. But when you take “photo after photo,” and later look at it, you see that there’s an order. No matter how wild or absurd I try to make something, after two or three days, I begin to see its place in that line..

What is order, then?

I feel like it’s being able to look at things from afar. Not seeing everything “up close,” like how we are all immersed in daily life. But I also really enjoy being submerged in chaos, because I feel like if I start planning or try to position myself within the art system, it overwhelms me, it suffocates me—it feels like office work. And I know there’s a contemporary art paradigm that goes in that direction: the artist as entrepreneur. But I chose this path because it gives me a lot of freedom—it’s very capricious… I really feel like I can do what I feel I want to do, without planning things out.

I’ve noticed in your work that you move freely between figuration and abstraction, going back and forth quite a bit, right? I wanted to ask, when figuration appears… who are these figures?

Well, I feel like it’s me in the future, but a miserable version of myself. Or maybe it’s me on the inside, sort of like when people say, “he has the soul of an old man.” I feel like I’m old inside, like I’m bald, miserable, defeated by life, even though I’m young in reality. But I feel like that’s the character that shows up.
In my recent paintings, for example, there’s a lot about the theme of the primordial couple. The penultimate exhibition I did was called “Adam and Eve, the Cavemen,” because I liked merging those two imaginaries. Adam and Eve as that primordial couple, pure until they commit sin, but they’re all white, heteronormative, clean, beautiful. On the other hand, the caveman image I feel like it's more polyamorous, pansexual, close to the animal realm—there’s violence, interspecies crossings. It’s something aberrant, and I like to think that this is reality, or the origin of humanity, and not that sanitized idea of Adam and Eve. But I still feel touched by the heteronormative myth of the primordial couple, reinforced by biology. In the end, it’s the culture I’m embedded in.



What are you working on now?

Now I’m working on my Ph.D., and my focus is on the form of myth, or the mythology inherent to painting. I think that’s closer to what I’m exploring. These very brief stories that explain the origin of something through the influence of something transcendent or supernatural—and how that translates into pictorial space. They’re very similar, very analogous. Painting has also recorded moments that inaugurate something: sexual identity, mortality, hierarchies, sibling rivalry—mythological themes. In painting, there are complementary color contrasts, there’s the above and the below, the divisions, what happens if there’s one figure or two figures, all these technical aspects evoke a certain mythology. I hold onto that formally, and conceptually we arrive at thinking about what the mythology of painting is.
And I feel like the mythology of painting is prehistoric painting, cave paintings, which have to do with painting as a propitiatory act, to make something happen. So I feel like this mythology lives on in those of us who paint—it’s what we need because, in my case, painting works almost as if it were a revelation of truth.

Like you were just saying, about that epiphanic hope that something will happen in the painting or drawing that will reveal something else we haven’t yet seen. I find it very interesting to see it that way—that there’s something in the craft that reveals to us something we haven’t even been able to ask ourselves yet.

Many times I’m not thinking about anything, or I do things that are very violent, and it’s also hard to see that, right? But what I’ve thought is that it’s very good for that to be there in the painting and drawing, and not in daily life. I feel like it’s a good system of catharsis and self-observation.

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When the question arises, when the craft becomes a capricious act of freedom, in that dystopian future as miserable as reality itself, there in that threshold committed to history and its sensations, in that abyss, in that instant, Julián irreverently invites us to ask ourselves, what’s the meaning of this thing we call being alive? And… how did we get here?
Perhaps it’s about peeking through his fiery material, imprinted on the reality he observes, his own “storm in a teacup,” and finding relief in recognizing the meaning of each movement.