Sergio Miguel's Brilliant, Bloody-Minded Baroque

Sergio Miguel's Brilliant, Bloody-Minded Baroque

Jan 13, 2025

A very popular, very corrosive way of looking at art history is to think of it as something fixed and pure. In the worldview of trad-posters and creeps who use marble statues as profile pictures, tradition is as tidy and easily accounted for as the pedigree of a yappy show-dog. There are clear beginnings and reassuring sign-posts: starting in ancient Greece where civilization was invented and proceeding nobly along a paved-over path up to the academic art of the late 1800s (boring nudes heaving boob-ily). Modernism is where things really begin to fall apart, and somewhere between Picasso’s wrong angles and Pollock’s emotional splatters, society as a whole became deeply, irrevocably fucked. Everything that’s happened since – from Bauhaus to Basquiat, Piss Christ to performance art – could be written off as a series of gross and Satanic mutations from a once-proud lineage.

But this version of the past is fairytale simple and pure cope; a heroic story for mediocre people that, for a time, even chihuahuas were once wolves. To come to grips with history isn’t to overstate its vice or virtue but to show how it’s woven and knotted its way to the present. Our shared record is a mess of many strands soaked in blood, and art is no exception. From the beginning painters, sculptors and craftspeople of all kinds have innovated and mourned their loss of tradition in the same breath, folding in new techniques while bending ancient symbols to their own contemporary ends. Bloodlines mix and cultures clash, and through them new styles emerge to bridge old worlds into the next.

For a time, the painter Sergio Miguel made this clash of purity and history one of his primary subjects. His early work riffed on the conventions of Mexican casta paintings, a colonial style of portraiture dedicated to categorizing its sitters by their racial mixture. In works like Loba mestiza” (2019) and De gringo, y puchuelo(2021), Miguel kept the casta’s fussy, formal drama while injecting naughty humor and kinky glamour, allowing his subjects to preen and sneer at their classification from the canvas. The boldness of this early work was a complicated mix of tribute and trolling, channeling the artist’s appreciation for history and his sensibility as a modern gay guy at several centuries of a remove. The clash between his style and subject matter was obvious but never simply the point. Miguel wasn’t interested in “problematizing” the past so much as exploring how he might square it with his moment, deploying light and shadow, blood and gore, angels and demons to conjure his own vision of the Baroque.

The Mexican Baroque shares a common DNA with its Spanish ancestor but differs in key ways. It’s incredibly theatrical: taking already striking scenes and heightening them with brilliant color and dramatic chiaroscuro light. More importantly, it joins indigenous, Christian and folk symbols into a hybrid style that’s both incredibly vivid and loaded with inscrutable meaning.

The thrill of Miguel’s paintings is seeing where he takes up history’s loose ends and runs with them into new and unsettling directions. Empty signifiers are cast in a modern light and familiar motifs are imbued with a mysterious new charge. His 2022 exhibition Army of Angels updated the Peruvian figure of the ángel arcabucero by reimagining them as gun-toting e-girls. Most recently, for his show Balada de la Inquisiciónat Company, the artist created a modern bestiary full of muscled Minotaurs, demonic horses, and blood-thirsty twinks. His creatures occupy a shadow zone located roughly between Clinton Hill and Silent Hill. In pieces like “Juan Bosco” and “Gaspar de Borja” (both 2023), the painter’s talent for simulating gnarly texture plays out on the bodies of half-human beasts, using subtle colors to highlight every ripple and fiber of their haunches and loins. These creations are both fully realized and never totally cohere. “Bosco” in particular is a head-scratching assemblage of limbs, joints and muscle that makes little bodily sense but follows a well-articulated and strangely sexy dream logic. They resemble some of the more frightening characters out of surrealist art and sexier characters of contemporary folk culture (why did they make the Mothman statue so ripped?).

Even though it’s a leap in his own work, what’s remarkable about Miguel’s painting is that you can clearly see its continuity. It doesn’t exist outside of tradition but rather as the latest, wildest kink in a bloody and continuing art history.

PAPER spoke to Sergio Miguel about erotic wounds, the Spanish (and Mexican) Inquisition, the meaning and use of blood and what Mexican art actually looks like.

I wanted to ask about casta paintings. How did you first discover them and what attracted you to them?

I think it was in high school, just in a history book or something really random. And I didn't think about it ever again until I started to look again at Mexican art and it felt overlooked.

What stuck out to you about it? You've used them for some time.

Well not so much anymore. I mean, there's the theme of blood still that is kind of central to this work, and maybe connects this work back to the casta paintings. But the blood is more literal now, whereas in the casta painting it was more about the purity of blood. It was the ideology behind the paintings. That was just my entry point into a more colonial world for me., I don't feel like I'm using it directly anymore.

Of course, but maybe what these bodies of work have in common is the drama of the casta paintings in a very intense way.

I don't disagree with that. I think that one of the things that I liked about the casta paintings was that it was an entryway to the colonial world, into this kingdom that doesn't exist anymore. So it's really easy to project a whole bunch of fantasies onto this kind of past where the Inquisition also happened. There's just so much there that makes my imagination go wild.

Sure and the Inquisition too is such a fantastical period of history where it's literally about hunting witches...

Yeah. And also, I think people solely think of the Spanish Inquisition as only happening in Spain, but it also happened in Mexico. And it comes roundabout to the casta painting because of this anxiety about the blood purity of these new people in the New World. So there's a recycling between the paintings and the Inquisition and then what I'm doing now.

One thing that I love about Mexican art in particular is that you have the formal purity of Spanish Masters like Goya or Velásquez, who are so talented that they can get away with mocking the king, in this fusion with Mexican folk culture. You've got that secret symbolism interspersed with this hybrid subject matter that mixes Catholic and indigenous together.

Yeah it definitely adds another way more interesting layer. There's a whole bunch of hidden messages in colonial work. Part of the reason why a lot of colonial stuff is overlooked is because for a long time people thought it was just New Spanish painters trying to be European. When, in fact, they're actually making their own imaginary and pictorial language. I realized that too sort of recently, which definitely sparked my interest more.

Your use of something like blood is really interesting, because if you think about what blood would have meant historically for Spanish colonial painting, it would have been stigmata, it would have been something that is so tied to Catholicism. But you're a contemporary artist and can make your own meaning. It doesn't have to be Jesus, it could be a horror movie. How do you treat loaded symbols like that?

I think if I was more subconsciously interested in blood before, now I'm more interested in the wound. And I don't really know exactly what that means. I have a better idea of how blood has been a thread throughout the work, but the wound, which is what I'm literally painting now, I don't really understand that. Wounds can be quite sexy, too. Erotic.

But the other thing about wounds is that they are an invitation for divine suffering… but like, you know, the other part of it is...

Carnal. It's very sexual, it's very sexual!

But like sexual in two ways, right? Like, it's both a hole to fill and it's also a hole that you make. And I'm kind of curious when you're kind of approaching this subject matter, where are you finding the sexuality in it?

I don't know about sexuality. I would say more sensuality. There's a lot of sensuousness in just the painting itself. I mean, I'm staring at these guys all day long, and painting their glistening, oiled-up bodies. That's very sensuous! I think the sexuality is very legible, but the sensuality is more of a feeling.

I loved your show at Company quite a bit in part because the sensuality is so intense. But it's for these objects that are very hard to even pick apart. I mean, the sensuousness of a twink is a little more obvious than the sensuality of your paintings of beasts.

There were a lot of bulging muscles that I painted on the beasts, which was kind of sensuous. But I can't explain it. I wanted to just not paint humans. There was something that attracted me to painting those, which wasn't so much like the sensuality I would feel painting bulging muscles but painting something more other-worldly. That was more attractive to me than anything else.

How did you come up with the beasts?

It was through Photoshop, AI, and honestly, my subconscious. I knew about medieval bestiaries, yeah, but I actively didn't look at them because I didn't want to be influenced by them. I would just talk to the computer. I made so many of them. Right after my last show, I was in Argentina for a month not doing anything. So I made thousands and thousands of like these fucked-up beasts. So it was just a lot of digital doodling on AI, and then I just started to narrow them down and edit them heavily.

There's this convention in casta paintings where it has these words written on top of right, and the beasts also have names. How and why did you name them?

There's two answers. One, people have been referring to these paintings as portraits, and they're not portraits. I'm getting their likeness, yes, but I'm creating a mise en scene. Blah, blah, blah. So I wanted to, like, kind of de-personalize the people but to give the beasts their own protagonism by giving them names. I just took them from all over history. My cousin's name is literally “Bosco.” That name to me is so medieval. “Bosco” is such an old Don Quixote-type name. Some of them are completely made up. "Torquemada" was the name of an Inquisitor but it sounded cool. So yeah from like, Catholicism to history to my relative's names.

I love the eclecticism of your work and how it pulls from Baroque and archaic and very modern places. But do you ever run into people reducing it to being simply "Mexican”?

No, and I wish they would! And I think they are very Mexican. But I think for many people, especially in the U.S., like, if I'm not painting a fucking cactus with an Abuelita making tortillas then it's not "Mexican." The American vision of what Mexican art should be is so flattened that I don't think people look at this work and say, like, "that's Mexican."

Or you go to any kind of church in Mexico, and you see the kind of sexy Christ statue with the wounds. But I don't think people would say that it's "Mexican." I wish they would! Maybe I would get more money for grants if they saw it that way, but they don't!

In a way this was kind of my impulse to paint the beasts. It'd be difficult to talk about heteronormative gender while looking at a demon horse.

There's this kind of hangover from this moment that we had recently in painting where the audience is instructed to see these subjects straight-on as your friends opposed to using their likeness as a jumping-off point for the imagination. Are you responding at all to contemporary painting or the limits of how people have regarded your work before?

Yeah, I definitely have done everything I can to try and get away from the whole, like, identity politics side of gay figurative painting. In a way this was kind of my impulse to paint the beasts. It'd be difficult to talk about heteronormative gender while looking at a demon horse. But it was also liberatory for me. It was more fun to do that than to do a self-portrait in the studio with my brushes in my hand. I'm tired of that.

So boring. What are you supposed to get out of it?

Narcissism? I mean, to say that I'm not a narcissist would be a lie, you know, I am a narcissist. We're all narcissists. But it's like that to me would just be so boring for me, personally.

But I think the other thing is that there's this narcissism of like in-groups: these are my friends and you're not one of them.

You called it a "friendtopia." I don't want to do that. I mean these are my friends but I don't know if I'd call this a utopia.

I mean, you're torturing twinks.

But some of them seem to like it. So maybe it is a sort of utopia! I don't know!

What's the deal with the biohazard sign in gold? When I first saw that, I thought it was the HIV-positive symbol you see on Grindr sometimes.

I knew I wanted to do gold leaf on the paintings. I didn't want it to be gratuitous in a way. I knew that I would use it for the names, but because I wasn't going to name the boys, I still wanted to use it somehow. And then I realized that, in a lot of the paintings, there's these industrial barrels. And one day, while I was working on these paintings, I was staring at the barrels, and I thought, "Oh, the biohazard symbol would kind of put all this together." It's the location, but also kind of the looming danger that it implies. It just made sense.

What kind of encounter do you want us to have with these paintings?

I hope people think the boys are sexy. And I hope they think the beasts are sexy in a different way.

I think the beasts are incredibly sexy.

Me too, except for the baby one, the deer, which is based on my dog.

Who is adorable.

Artist portraits by Daniel Rampulla
Gallery photos courtesy of Company Gallery and Sebastian Bach