Portraits from the inside out: the disarming works of Mexican artist Nahum Zenil reflect sensitive personal issues and challenge society's stereotypes.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

THE HOUSE OF ARTIST NAHUM ZENIL in Mexico City does not feel like a home, but what might be called a residential installation. It is more a monument to a lost past, an effort to retrieve, through replication of objects, events associated with childhood. With essentially no evidence of ongoing human activity, it seems more like a shrine to a long-departed ancestor, perhaps a cherished grandmother or great-aunt. Nothing is disturbed. Each relic remains as it was when the last breath was drawn. It is a solemn space, suffused with reverence; one feels the sorrow and pain the artist must have experienced as he fashioned each element. "It's so. Everything has a nostalgic air," Zenil admits, as he and Gerardo Vilchis Duran, his partner of twenty-four years, conduct a tour of the premises.

Carefully staged parlors, vestibule, and bed chambers even more evoke a sense of that bygone era. Pieces of period oak furniture compete for space with dozens of constructions and display cases containing objects found and fashioned, most with a vintage quality. The walls, too, seem to reek with the dust of age, covered as they are with antique frames containing Zenil's paintings and drawings, mostly in sepias to suggest the passage of years. Oil lamps, siphon bottles, dried flowers, lace doilies, embroidered pillow covers and shams, antimacassars, porcelain-headed dolls, and discolored photos add to the verisimilitude, reinforcing an illusion that one has entered a dwelling suspended in time.

Hospitable but quiet and reticent, only in guarded sentences does Zenil reveal the basis for some drawings and paintings--his early youth when he lived with his grandmother, Enedina, his mother, Dona Genoveva, and sister, Concepcion, on a rancheria called El Tecomate in the huasteca veracruzana. Zenil was born in 1947 in the nearby town of Chicontepec. "My father, Adalberto Bernabe, abandoned the family when I was about five years old," he explains. "A schoolteacher, he actually taught me briefly at the one-room school house at El Tecomate. He liked to draw and also played the guitar and violin quite well. That's him," he adds, as he points out a miniature photo of his father framed in a heart hidden within a painted window-frame construction, Come Up to My Window (1982). But for one other vintage photo tucked away in an upstairs room, Zenil's father is absent from the house.

In contrast, women in Zenil's family figure in several important works. For example, Family Portrait (1987) depicts his mother sitting next to Gerardo with Zenil behind with his hands on their shoulders. "It's my reconstituted family," he says. Pointing to a dog floating on a cloud in the background, he adds "That's Monna [sic] Lisa, whom I had for ten years until she died just before this painting. That's my grandmother's house where we lived in El Tecomate--a traditional rural structure with mud walls and thatched roof. Early on I decided to use my mother's family name. As to Nahum, my maternal grandfather had the same name, that of a prophet mentioned in the Old Testament."

Zenil's extended family belonged to the lower middle-class. While his grandmother did not have fancy furnishings, the main room of her house did feature large-framed portraits, postcards, and other family mementos much like those in the artist's museum-home of today. In his own bedroom, he particularly enjoyed looking at a large corner altar devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The image eventually inspired several paintings, including Thank You, Virgin of Guadalupe (1988), which depicts the artist as a winged angel clutching the robe of the Virgin, who bears the face of his aged mother. Near the end of her life, he did Mother in the Hospital (1985), which depicts her in a chair asleep, breathing from an oxygen mask with an intravenous tube connected to her wrist. Another touching tribute is Sorrow (1987), done soon after her passing, which shows the artist sitting next to an ornate coffin engraved with floral motifs from which his mother ascends to heaven as a death...