SHOCKING AND BEAUTIFUL

Artists' Works Reflect Gruesome Reality of Mexico's War on Drug
Cartels

"We are here," he says, pushing his finger to the very edge of the
large tome he pulls out of a bag to show me. "Maybe we fall off."

Gustavo Monroy is a Mexican artist who is always working on the edge.
His paintings, meticulous and almost freakishly anatomical in their
gore, feature decapitated heads and masked men with guns to their temples.

This is not art for over your couch. But Mr. Monroy's fear of falling
off the edge isn't a matter of taste or aesthetics. It's fear for his country.

The artist opens his book, and flips through the pages.

"This is how I do my work," he says. "Every morning I read three or
four newspapers."

He shows me page after page of clippings from Mexican newspapers:
shots of severed heads lying in pools of blood, bullet-riddled
corpses slumped across steering wheels or splayed on the street,
hacked-off limbs, masked gunmen brandishing huge automatic weapons,
more heads, more bodies, more blood.

Hundreds of articles and news photos, all collected in the past few
years, since he began his series of works that focus on Mexico's
virulent war of narcoterrorism.

"In Mexico we see images like this every day. So this is normal," he
says. "We look at this and we eat our breakfast."

Since the government of President Felipe Calderon launched its war on
the drug cartels in 2006, the death count has sky-rocketed: 23,000
people so far. Last year alone, Mexico saw 6,587 drug-related murders
and this year is setting the pace for a new high.

They are rival drug gang members, police officers, politicians and
ordinary Mexicans caught in the wrong place at the wrong time -- such
as the latest victims, 20 people who died yesterday after gunmen
attacked in Puerto Madero, Tamaulipas state.

Sitting surrounded by his canvasses at Mexico City's prestigious
Museo de Arte Moderno, Mr. Monroy gestures toward his gruesome pictures.

"I am an artist. I am trying to reflect my time, and this is my time," he says.

He looks over to one painting that features his head on a stump, with
the Mexican eagle flying triumphant overtop. "Mexico Lindo"
(beautiful Mexico) is emblazoned across the top of the canvas.

Mr. Monroy laughs, without humour. The bright colours, the mariachi
bands and the pretty flowers so familiar to Canadian tourists are one
reality of Mexico, he says, but "this, this is also Mexico Lindo."

The relentless onslaught of grim news and gore has inured many
Mexicans to the horror. They want to look away, he says. And that is
something he wants to change with his art.

"I want to shock. But a new kind of way to shock. I'm trying to get
into your heart, your feelings, your perception. I am trying to say,
'Stop this massacre, stop this violence.' "

Like the acts of violence themselves, you can be taken off-guard by
Mexico's art of violence.

Wandering through Museo universitario Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), the
spectacular new contemporary art gallery at one of Mexico City's
universities, my arm is kissed by bubbles blowing through a corridor,
speaking of freedom, childhood innocence and joy.

Except there's that little sign on the wall warning this art
installation contains microscopic elements of sanitized human waste.
This is the work of TeresaMargolles.

My guide, Francisco Montes, explains, "She is an artist who comes
from Sinaloa, where the narco-terror is prevalent and she is also a
forensic medical specialist. She often incorporates the water used to
wash off the corpses in the morgue into her art."

Last year, at the Venice Biennale, Ms. Margolles presented What Else
Could We Talk About? -- an endless stream of blood running down a
wall and pooling on the floor.

Around the corner from the bubble machine, Mr. Montes takes me to
something "he likes." We stop in front of what appears to be a very
large sheet of crumpled sheet metal. On closer approach, it is a
canvas layered in duct tape.

I smile. Duct tape.

But this is Mexico and the piece by Gabriel de la Mora is anything
but lighthearted.

The guide says, "This particular kind of tape, it is used here in
Mexico for la desaparicion, the kidnappings, so that the victims
cannot speak or cry out. And so the artist is referencing that and
asking us to look at this situation. To look again."

The media and many in political circles, both outside and inside
Mexico, increasingly talk about whether Canada's southern-

most NAFTA partner is the latest "failed state."

In 2009, a report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command warned Mexico was
on the precipice of "rapid and sudden collapse" because of the drug cartels.

While Mr. Calderone was greeted with rapturous applause in Parliament
in Ottawa on his recent trip, not everyone feels that way back home.
Four years of slaughter have many asking whether his heavy-fisted
policy of military attacks on the narco-trafficos needs to be abandoned.

Artemio, 34, is the best-selling artist at the uber-trendy Yautepec
Gallery in Mexico's capital. His snowflake-like mandalas of weapons,
regularly priced at more than $1,800 a canvas, have been exhibited
around the globe.

The mandalas, which feature pristine arrangements of automatic
weapons, grenade launchers and other tools of the drug trade, are
disturbingly beautiful.

"Yes, sometimes guns are beautiful," says Artemio. "They are not the
problem, no? It's what is done with them.... It's the humans who use them."

The artist knows who to blame for the carnage. "At least with the bad
guys, you know they are bad guys, not like the politicians.

"When the stupid president we have now decided to act like a maniac
and be the big brave man who destroyed the drug cartels, he opened
Pandora's box. Before, the violence was outside in the countryside.
Now they brought it into our house."

And the violence is creeping ever closer to the President himself.

Just before Mr. Calderon's Canadian trip, Diego Fernandez de
Cevallos, his mentor and a former presidential candidate, was
kidnapped from his country estate. A photograph of his beaten and
haggard face, in front of a black garbage bag meant to catch any
blood, was transmitted to news agencies hours later.

The kidnapping has sent a

shock wave through Mexico's ruling class. If the drug dealers can
take a powerful man like Mr. Cevallos, who is safe?

Despite the relentless coverage of the narcoterror in Mexico's
northern states over the past few years, the citizens of Mexico City,
especially its elite denizens, have largely felt the danger is "over
there." But with Mr. Cevallo's kidnapping, there is a new sense of
vulnerability.

Mexico, says Mr. Monroy, has become "like [Paolo] Escobar's Colombia.
I think we are reaching this place now."

In December, he went to visit his parents in Sonora, a Mexican state
bordering Arizona. On a trip to the market with his mother, gunfire
burst out. Nearby, one person fell dead.

"It can be anytime, anywhere," he says. "You go to the movies, the
disco, the market on a Saturday afternoon and you die."

He was working on his largest work at the time. After many years of
beheaded portraits, "I wanted something monumental, something very
shocking and very beautiful."

So he made his own version of Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper,
with his own face as Christ and the faces of his friends as the
disciples, all beheaded and lying on the table.

"I wanted to show that it could be anyone. Everyone."

"My best friends don't know, and will never know, what happened with
their heads. The last thing they knew about Mexico, our country, is
that blood ran and nobody, absolutely nobody, took charge of anything."

Just one of the heads has its eyes open. Staring straight out at the
viewer, it is the head of his friend and mentor, artist Arturo Rivera.

"I use him as the conscience of the painting. He is saying, 'Look at
me. We are all seated at this table.' He is challenging us to respond."

But, like Artemio, Mr. Monroy has little hope that the response lies
with the politicians.

He has already begun his latest beheaded portrait: a painting of Mr.
Cevallos. No love lost, though.

"Go out in the street and ask 10 ordinary people whether they want
Cevallos alive or dead," he challenges me, "Ten out of 10 will tell
you, 'Dead.' He represents the worst example of politics, corrupt. We
want a different kind of politician."

But, like many in Mexico, the artist sees no easy answers.

"I cannot go into the streets and kill all the bad people, like a
mafioso. At least, it is not legal. I am not a revolutionary. I am
not a guerilla. I am an artist. I can only paint my time."

Does he foresee a time when he will not be painting these grisly scenes?

He looks across at his Last Supper and laughs.

"Maybe I am hoping for the Resurrection. [And then] one day I will
paint landscapes, for the first time."