The Mexican artist Daniel Lezama is best known for his highly realistic, complex, and sometimes disturbing compositions of Mexican people in strange dream-like situations with strong symbolic meanings connected with Mexican history and traditions.

Lezama grew up in Mexico City, where his father was a commercial painter. He studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, where he graduated in 1997. After spending time in Paris, France, and Texas, he returned to his home city and has lived and worked there for the last two decades.

Lezama’s style is heavily influenced by classical artists including Rubens, Goya, Caravaggio and Velazquez, and Lezama uses the same level of painterly detail to create unreal scenes inspired by aspects of historical and contemporary Mexican life, interpreted from his own very personal point of view. Many of his paintings gather groups of unrelated people in unexpected settings, resulting in representations that resemble surrealistic art. While his images represent everyday characters, in his compositions they are converted into history, myths and legends. Each aspect of the composition has a singular significance, and the composition as a whole connects all the characters together.

He has defined elements of his style as ‘figurative’ since his representations seem real but they are not, ‘naturalist’ because he creates from the imagination instead of using models, and ‘allegorical’ because his work can be subjected to multiple interpretations. He stresses that he does not paint what he likes, but what he must.

Early in his career, he was awarded the acquisition prize during the X Rufino Tamayo Biennale in Mexico in 2001 for his work Niña Muerta (Dead Girl), a decision that was controversial and hotly contested. He has received multiple recognitions and sponsorships since then. His work has been shown in more than twenty solo exhibitions and sixty collective exhibitions, in Mexico, Colombia, the USA and Germany.

Describing himself as ‘a reflective hedonist’, Lezama lives and works in downtown Mexico City, travelling daily from his home to his studio near El Zocalo in the centre of the city in order to separate his artistic endeavours from his private life.

You can see an insightful video from 2020 of Daniel Lezama talking about his work (in English) here.

We are very grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for suggesting the inclusion of this artist, and for supplying most of the images.