For nearly twenty years, the Mexican-American, mixed-race Indigenous artist Chicome Itzcuintli Amatlapalli has worked under the pen name Félix D’Eon. While the majority of his work explores his Native identity and depicts scenes drawn from the sacred narratives of Mesoamerica, he is also queer. While his body of work as Chicome primarily explores Indigenous identity, only incidentally addressing queer experience as lived by two-spirit and Indigiqueer people, he created the alter ego Félix D’Eon in order to explore the full breadth of the queer community.
His work as Felix speaks to various traditions, through which he portrays queer, white, Latinx, and Native American imagery as part of his own heritage as a mixed-race, Mexican-American artist. However, his work also engages with the broader queer community. He portrays ethnicities beyond his own, as well as other forms of queerness, such as trans people and queer women. He focuses on a variety of body types and ages, aiming to represent the beauty and diversity of the queer community. To do so, he seeks out models from the different communities he represents, listens to their ideas, learns how they wish to be represented, and asks permission to tell their stories and paint their fantasies. In this sense, his work is a collaborative effort.
He is captivated by various art-historical styles, including Edwardian fashion, children’s book illustration, golden-era US comics, and Japanese Edo printmaking. In his work, he creates the illusion of antiquity, using vintage papers and conducting careful research on costume, set, and style. His goal is perfect verisimilitude. He subverts the “wholesome” image of antique illustration styles, harnessing their imagery to present a vision of queer love and sensibility. He treats vintage illustrative styles as a rhetorical strategy, using their language of romance, economic power, and aesthetic sensibility to tell stories of historically oppressed and marginalized queer communities.
By painting images of queer love, seduction, sex, and romance, he strips the gay subject of its taboo nature. Through his work, he seeks to normalize the marginal and place the previously taboo subject at the center, utilizing the rhetorical styles of the historically empowered and mainstream. In his work as Felix d’Eon, the illustrative imagery of the past does not lose its wholesome nature through the inclusion of queer love, sex, and sensibilities. He simply expands the notion of what wholesome is, erasing shame and celebrating desire.
