..."In Daniel Lezama, post-Duchampian conceptuality -as opposed to conceptualism- is disguised in games whose iconographical 'perversity' seems to long for trans-realistic unveiling and departure, while its revisitation (in all senses) of the golden and classical roots of modern art is markedly non-appropiatory: instead of amounting to a mimesis of a symbolistic, surreal or minimal -and even less of ideological or 'populist'- nature, here imitation leads towards extreme introspection. The moment of painting simulates an impossible story and narrative, a time elapsed yet unresolved, a necessarily diminished state of being: still, the disarmed cruauté of his mastery -as well as the disarming mastery of his tenderness- propose a new ethics of the 'immoralistic' gaze." (...) Francesco Pellizzi, catalogue text, 2000.
Where does the thread of Lezama's artistic lineage lead us back to? To cite only a few names we find Caravaggio, of course, the creator of vast psychic landscapes that open and close fundamental periods, the heterodox founder of lasting orthodoxy; at times also Don Francisco de Goya, accountable for another Spanish Century inhabited by monsters and duchesses, the hundred years spanning from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century; and -to hazard a personal reference- probably Edward Hopper, the great painter of melancholy as meeting ground between the character and the pictorial infinitude of sadness. Hopper is a saga of the city in the hour of abandon, Lezama a tally of the city in the hour when television is forgotten. (...)
In those canvases that turn away from anecdote (women as still lives, female nudes depicted in wonder foreboding the destruction of self) Lezama unveils his project: to find through painting answers of life and art, that go beyond the literary but seize literature as a tool to decipher viewer response. I believe this is the key: stories are a method to repossess painting, to capture melancholy and sadness, the passing through of mortal life." (...) Carlos Monsiváis, catalogue text, 2000
..."Possessing both an ethical, humanistic conscience, and a vast experience in the portrayal of faces and figures, Lezama is able to trigger a complex role play between the characters hosted in his paintings, reinstating the hidden, universal condition of mythological discourse into the iconographic structure of his narratives: behind the scenes in these stories we find, on one hand, the figures of the mother and the father perpetuating themselves in an offspring that is at once stand-in and usurper; on the other extreme, we find the first couple of lovers dancing away their encounter. Between the given love of the family and the invented love for others and other, the images of Lezama, as any other mythology, weave each other into the branches of a reconquered family tree that shines with meaning." (...) Erik Castillo, catalogue text, 2000
..."The stories told by Lezama share the fervor of painterly illustrations of historical fact, Biblical imagery, gender scenes or mythological allegory, in the manner of late 19th Century Mexican romantic or nationalist painters that practiced a narrative so enslaved by the authoritarian official discourse, that the real social issues of the time where deemed too pedestrian to be adressed by the noble art of painting. (...)
Therefore, the technical lesson extracted by Lezama from his "forefathers" is applied to his imagery in a "spirit" exactly opposite to theirs. Authoritarism, be it political, theological, academic, psychological, familiar, or else, is a thanatical order under which and against which an erotic monster always grows secretly (or almost so). Against 19th Century ideals such as the exaltation of artificiality to the level of the sublime, the illusion of life in the human figure, and the elevation of the ordinary to the realm of the extraordinary, Lezama proposes profuse carnality, an effusion of excess, and procacity bordering on perversion. And to the notion that trascendence is inherent to painterly genre subjects such as the religious and the historical, Lezama answers with a macabre joke: the nation's historic condition reflected in the Mexican family life of the lowest social class becomes the ground for a number of interpretations of material and spiritual misery (coreographed as in past centuries, but updated into various stagings of internal conflicts and excluding the poetics of the status quo) that turn up -to everyone's amazement- in the most unexpected situations, characters and contexts." (...) Luis Carlos Emerich, catalogue text, 2001
"In another strange turn of events, Roebling Hall has completely remade itself for Daniel Lezama's show Morality Plays of classical paintings. The last time I dropped by, the place was dim and spooky. This time it's like tope, and there are naked ladies all over the place. Almost schizophrenic in its change of shows, I was wowed by the big canvasses. Suffice to say that Lezama has some serious painting chops. Shades of Fischl, Velazquez, and even Hopper don't overshadow Lezama's compelling figurative narratives. These are culturally loaded and just plain loaded paintings that mix up cultural icons with a vengeance. (....) I really like these paintings, but they just seem ready for a critical beating from somebody. I don't know quite why, except maybe it was all that feminist theory at university. Fuck it, this is a show worth seeing regardless of my feelings about the patriarchal history of painting." Keane A. Pepper, http://web.archive.org/web/20041018214810/http://www.freewilliamsburg.com/, Dec. 2002
"The work of Daniel Lezama captures a world of dream-like adolescent sexual anxiety, with a fecund southern voluptuousness missing from many of his contemporary's paintings. The artist hails from Mexico and there is a tang of the great Spanish heritage. Goya and Velazquez were called to mind, though Lezama seems conversant with the current wan aesthetics, as when he flattens forms, masses shapes, and pursues speedy resolutions to maintain a spontaneous freshness. (...) The presence of the dreamy youth, a boy on the verge of adult sexuality is a bracing and sometimes disquieting image though the warm palette and conventional handling of the figures is oddly familiar and comforting. Though the work of Lezama is in the classic realm of surrealism, it does raise the potential of going beyond the societally acceptable. As porn, first soft and now the more hard core becomes mainstream, where is that edge, that boundary where the artistically valid meets the governmentally sanctioned?" (James Kalm, "Power to the Penis", at http://web.archive.org/web/20041018214810/http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/, Dec 2002)
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