Conversación hiriente [Hurtful Conversation]

Melecio Galván (San Rafael, Mexico, 1945—1982) was a Mexican draughtsman who was little-known during his lifetime. This is principally because he was a socio-politically committed artist wary of the commercial gallery circuit as well as art institutions controlled by the state. He arose from a working-class family in San Rafael, on the outskirts of Mexico City, and died under mysterious circumstances in that town at the age of 37, just when he was reaching the apogee of his mature style. Galván studied at the Academia San Carlos in Mexico City between 1965 and 1968. His preferred medium was ink on paper, and he created page upon page of sketchbooks filled with drawings. The major themes he developed in his work were reinterpretations of classical drawings of the human figure and anatomy studies, explorations of the grotesque, and themes related to the socio-political situation in Mexico, especially following the 1968 Tlateloco Massacre. In 1971-72, he traveled to Northern California where he collaborated on a mural in Fresno and created illustrations for the Latino journal Basta Ya (Enough Already) in San Francisco. Back in Mexico City, from 1977 to 1981 he was a member of the Grupo MIRA, primarily comprised of printmakers who favored themes of politics and social justice. He is perhaps best known for a series of politically-engaged works from 1980 entitled Militarismo y represión (Militarism and Repression). Galván had solo exhibitions at the Antonio Souza Gallery in Mexico City in 1968 and 1969, as well as a one-man show of thirty-five drawings at the G. Gallery in Wichita, Kansas, in 1970. With the exception of solo exhibitions at the Librería Gandhi (Gandhi Bookstore) in 1972 and the Escuela de Diseño y Artesanía del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (School of Design and Crafts of the National Institute of Fine Arts) in 1977 in Mexico City, as well as several collective exhibitions, he had no further showings of his work while living, outside of many illustrations in books, periodicals, print compilations, and labor union materials. In the catalogue of a posthumous retrospective exhibition held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1983, leading Mexican art historian Ida Rodríguez Prampolini asserted that “[Galván] left us an exceptional body of work which, had he promoted it, would have converted him into the most important draughtsman in the country.” (Melecio Galván: La ternura, la violencia, p. 13)