“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

- Robert Frost

Move aside beloved 80s dance classics, for there’s a new mythology sauntering onto your dancefloor. It swaggers with that Patrick Swayze confidence—cool attitude squeezed into tight jeans and flexing cowboy boots. It glistens under neon club lights, simultaneously stoking desire and denying access to its craven onlookers all at once. Its name? Well, let’s ask Ana Segovia.

Segovia, 33, may be celebrated as a painter, but to define him solely by his medium would be a disservice. Segovia joins me over the phone, weaving (and halting appropriately) through traffic in his home metropolis, Mexico City—our distance abbreviated by a WhatsApp call. His voice has the buoyant inflection of someone straddling realms. And he is, artistically speaking.

As I speak with the artist, I get the sense that he’s part of a bygone era—one defined by a certain in-betweenness, a willing curiosity, and an indifference to being “understood” that’s generally lost to the hyperreality and intricate carpentry of image-making in the internet age. He’s both chaste with his opinions, and unafraid to be the provocateur. He’s unguarded, but careful with how he doles out his critiques of the art world, and similarly concerned with how he’s coming off during our conversation.

The tenor in question? God no, not snobby at all. He detests art snobs, but he’ll also quote Robert Frost (and it’ll work). He examines the world sprawled out before him but does so with care, his ethos as much about creation as it is about consumption. His life has been most changed by the art he hates, and Segovia is, above all, generous—his considered reflections landing in my lap like manna from heaven.

This “both/and-ness”—the ability to exist within contradictions—is inherently tied to the queer experience, which Segovia channels into his practice. “This is awful—what I’m gonna tell you—but I think it’s important to say.” I brace myself, only to be met with a moment of pure revelation. “I was experiencing my transness for the first time and tried to assume my own masculinity, and I ended up performing the most toxic masculinity imaginable because I grew up idealizing the charro,” Segovia tells me, explaining the trigger for an intervention his friends gave him. The rub being that his confession was, of course, very much not awful. He hands me the gift of candor laced with humor and depth.

Transformation, not derivation, seems to be Segovia’s ilk—a lineage of genre-blurring innovators. “I mean [the paintings I was making at that point] were really not exciting at all,” he confesses. “It all sort of coincided with my crisis of identity—of trying to figure out why I was being the thing that I most feared.” The intervention, ultimately, was what pushed him to develop the style that is now unmistakably his own: vivid, campy reinterpretations of the charro, the iconic Mexican cowboy, made with the flamboyance of neons.

Segovia is now presenting his first solo museum show with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, through their recently resurrected MOCA Focus program. MOCA Focus: Ana Segovia expands the artist’s signature exploration of the charro and the Golden Age of cinema in Mexico and the Southwest United States. The exhibition coalesces around a fictional film, conceptualized by Segovia himself. I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1983) is a queer love story set in a fictional border town in the Southwestern United States. Its protagonists—aglow in the fluorescence of Segovia’s palette—are Buck, an aspiring artist, and Mario, an undocumented ranch hand.

“The 80s were so Camp and so queer-coded, but [they] never outright truly told the queer story—at least not that one that I had access to growing up in Mexico City,” Segovia tells me. “So I decided to make the movie I never saw.” At its core, the exhibition is a frank, but deeply considered reflection on desire. “It’s about something that’s impossible: wanting to see something that never existed.”

Segovia’s obsession with film began early. And he credits the medium extensively, noting that films “served ideological purposes for their countries, not just in gender, but also in terms of the myth-making of gender identity.” In this exhibition with MOCA, he embodied the directorial perspective, painting the scenes as if they had been shot for film.

Segovia’s careful hand guided the entire execution of the exhibit. Not a single thread was left dangling when it comes to the viewer’s experience (except for those Segovia wants you to tie up for yourself). The exhibit shuttles its attendees in by offering them an excerpt of the script at random, allowing each visitor ownership of a small fragment of the film’s narrative.

As attendees move through the space, they inevitably fall under Segovia’s influence. The large polyptychs all the way at the back—eight large panels comprising a mural—Segovia likens to a dance sequence, cleverly reminding me, “You know, eight is the time of dance.” The pieces themselves are snapshots of the subjects in motion, dancing, grooving, seducing.

The choreography extends far beyond the canvas. The actual footpath through the show is also a reflection of the movement in the works. “I was always very conscious that I wanted to have the body of the audience in dialogue with the movement that you’re seeing [in the works],” the artist shares. The exhibit itself is a sort of pas de trois—an act of weight-sharing between the queered body, the artist, and the public.

This subtle performance teases the object of desire before the observer, but yanks it away at the last moment. “You’re forced to move across and back and forth and sort of almost dance around the structures in order to access the paintings,” Segovia explains of how he purposefully obfuscated the paintings in order to deny visitors the pleasure of seeing it all at once. Perhaps, the work suggests, there is more beauty in the yearning than the having.

By engaging observers in this way, inducting them into a playful ritual of flirtation, Segovia is effectively queering the institutional space of the museum. His work, something of a Trojan horse, invites viewers into a pocket of the queer experience (cruising) often overlooked in mass culture—an “if you know, you know” sort of thing, but also an amplification of a story seldom told.

In her seminal essay, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag states, “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman’...[Camp] is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” Segovia agrees. And while he credits Sontag with stirring his early obsession with the aesthetic sensibility, their final theses diverge, leading to the precise discourse between art and life that Segovia craves.

Sontag also claims that, “the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical.” But, for Segovia, Camp is the instrument with which he designs his political engagement. On how he deals with “heavy political subjects” in his work, Segovia presses those who are afraid to play: “You can have fun. You can think hard and you can be politically active, and dance, right? Like, I don’t know. Maybe it’s corny.”

In his recent collaboration with Jose Cuervo, Segovia channels this energy again while designing the box for boutique signature Tequila Reserva de la Familia. “I decided that I couldn’t help myself,” he laughs, recounting how he outfitted the legacy tequila brand in “very queer-coded” colors. Another Trojan horse, “in the sense that it becomes a large-scale installation piece that gets commercialized in airports, but then it has a strong political statement behind it.”

In a world where everyone seems to have a pathological need for comfort, which, let’s be honest, pretty much renders us all impotent and disconnected from desire, Segovia is embracing the power of Camp and humor to push us beyond that which is circumscribed by “high culture.” The androgyny of his art is quite possibly its superpower. When you’re not sure whether to laugh or weep, perhaps that is when it’s being done right.

I ask the artist for a piece of parting wisdom before we go. He says, “Try to experience art, not art history. Try to have a genuine dialogue with what you’re looking at.” Now, in his honor, let’s have a kiki.