A Mexico City exhibition of paintings portraying sexualized and queer Christian priests and nuns has elicited fervent complaints from religious groups and right-wing figures who have held protests at the museum for over a week.
Artist Fabián Cháirez’s exhibition La venida del Señor (The coming of the Lord) opened on February 5 at the Academia de San Carlos Centro Historico, a building affiliated with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. Consistent with the artist’s practice of entwining sexual diversity and subversions of traditional gender roles in retellings of Mexican history and Christianity, the series of nine paintings dating from 2018 to 2023 show consecrated women and men in suggestive poses.
“It’s an exercise in which I make a comparison between religious ecstasy and sexual ecstasy, two things that would appear to be opposites but actually have more in common,” Cháirez told Hyperallergic in Spanish over WhatsApp.
Some paintings feature the nuns with their eyes shut in ecstasy, using glasses of wine or folds in robes as allusions to digital penetration, while priests are depicted performing individual or group fellatio on melting altar candles, kneeling on all fours to drink red wine from a cup, and licking Jesus Christ’s nailed feet on the crucifix.
Incensed by the exhibition’s contents, the Mexican chapter of the Association of Christian Lawyers (AAC) says it filed a legal complaint against Cháirez with the National Council to Prevent Discrimination (CONAPRED), a government agency established in 2003 to promote policies for equality and resolve complaints of alleged discriminatory acts. As reported by Infobae, the AAC’s complaint was digitally signed by 9,000 people and claims that La venida del Señor “violates the right to freely profess one’s faith without being the object of attacks,” citing Article 24 of the Mexican Constitution.
AAC declined to provide comment via email, citing the confidential nature of the complaint.
“There is a double standard from the public that feels offended,” Cháirez explained to Hyperallergic, adding that many of the complainants are “characters who self-define as ‘the new Mexican right-wing.'” Conservative figures such as Mexican Senator Lilly Téllez, Luis Felipe Calderón Zavala (son of former Mexican President Felipe Calderón), and “ultra-conservative” actor and far-right leader Eduardo Verástegui voiced their disdain for the exhibition online.
“I think there are other issues we should be protesting against, such as the church’s abuse of power and sexual abuses within the church,” the artist continued.
Beyond the AAC’s complaints, the exhibition has faced multiple protests onsite from groups taking offense to Cháirez’s portrayals. On Valentine’s Day, February 14, Catholic protesters organized outside the Academia de San Carlos with signs that read “Blasphemy is not art” and accused the artist of bringing about “Christianophobia” in Mexico.
Another intervention occurred inside the gallery yesterday, February 19, when members of UNAM’s Catholic community entered the space and staged a symbolic closure of the show with caution tape, signs, and t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “No ofendas mi fe en nombre del arte” (“Don’t offend my faith in the name of art”). The action was peaceful and the participants left without incident.
“As an artist and member of the LGBTQ community, the fact that the far right is making gains is quite uncomfortable,” Cháirez continued. “But it’s important that we reconsider our strategies to confront any violence that we might face, especially by seeking community and trying to connect with people in real life who might think differently from us and exist in other contexts — by sharing information so that others can understand difference, freedom of expression, freedom of artistic expression, and all freedoms.”
Right: In a latex luchador mask, Fabián Cháirez poses onsite between two paintings from the solo exhibition.
This isn’t the first time Cháirez’s artwork has drawn criticism, particularly for its LGBTQ+ content or interpretations of the paintings as such. A 2019 exhibition devoted to Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City became the site of a protest that escalated into violence between representatives of the nation’s farmworker unions and LGBTQ+ activists over the inclusion of the artist’s 2014 portrait of a nude Zapata with a pink sombrero and seated pin-up style on a horse. The museum kept the painting on view but removed it from the exhibition’s publicity campaign and added a wall text expressing the Zapata family’s disagreement with Cháirez’s representation.
With regards to La venida del Señor, Cháirez said that UNAM has taken some security measures for visitors and staff since the beginning of protests to avoid additional tensions with the public, “but so far there are no indications that the show will be closed, and I think that’s a very positive stance on their part.”
Valentina Di Liscia contributed reporting and translation assistance.
I love it! Everywhere and every time the Right Wing of the world’s religions gets huffy over a smackdown pie in the face, never do they think “Hmm, does our royal prissiness provoke our own hissy fits?” You’d think the 35-year-old storms over Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, et al, or much earlier upsets by Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence, would have fostered fearless moral inventories amongst conservative Catholics, Evangelical Protestants and Fundamentalist Muslims around the globe. After all, no-one was calling for crucifixions–just the right to boink in peace, to choose the boinkee we love, and control our creation of boinklings.
But for the Right, freedom means they’re free to lecture you & me. The ancient idea that making love is a gift from god was scribbled over with Christian graffiti saying nope, it’s “Cuius regio, eius religio;” an actual assumption from Europe’s Middle Ages that essentially meant “you’ll follow the rule of your leader’s religion.” Doesn’t sound all that Medieval, does it? Ever since then the godly closed their eyes and thought of England while the ungodly birds & bees & queer penguins of the world continued with unspeakable mating calls, feathered burlesques and nuptial queen flights. But if work and war (and now the weather) are so not fun, can’t we at least let sex be fun? Or at least artfully funny? The Catholic Church, which made me the pro-labor, pro-immigrant, anti-death penalty saint I am today, would win so much goodwill if it let women decide their own corporal careers, and allowed priests to realize healthy conjugations not limited to the Latin verbs of their sticky dreams. I’ve actually shared a few discreet, uh, interjections with lonely, wayward priests, and lordy-lord, even in brightly lighted rooms (so god could see everything), their passion-propelled “Eo!” was a cry for freedom like Jesus might have still heard from Spartacus, three centuries later.
Mexico, with its brave history of anti-clerical secular reforms, is perfectly primed to pressure a mummified Church to follow (a more fearless) Francis into a 21st-century Ethos of Eros. But heads-up for the Church Fathers: to pray for sexual enlightenment, start by turning down those lights.