Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn't be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader
can only come from things remembered — not from yesterday but from a long time ago.
W. G. Sebald
Michael Tracy always had a fascination with maps and travel. As an adult, he traveled to Colombia, Egypt, France, Greece, India, Italy, Madagascar, Mexico, Russia, Sri Lanka, and Turkey; yet and even as a child, he was captivated by the romance of escape to distant places.
By the time he found San Ygnacio in 1978, he was desperate to be as far away from US mainstream culture without leaving the country. One of many self-imposed exiles, this was probably the most impactful on his mid-career work. Less than a decade after his first solo exhibition in 1971 at what was then the Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute; his dramatic move to the US-Mexico border preceded the global critical acclaim that was to come.
Now, in this first posthumous exhibition, older works that capture his deep-rooted and visceral connection to Mexico are placed alongside select works from the last twenty years. “The Elegy of Distance” reflects on Tracy’s many exiles, and the passionate cycles of work that accompanied his flights.
Certainly, Tracy’s two decades in India, starting in 1999, represent a synthesis much like his “marriage of Mexico and Italy” in the 1980s. His Indian residency had as much to do with contemporary geopolitical forces used against innocent people as it did with Michael’s physical reactions to such injustice. Like open-heart surgery, he had felt that Mexico’s intensity and directness had ripped his aorta and re-connected his heart to the blood running through its war- torn streets, and in India he experienced a deeper, if not karmic connection to its culture. Although he never really considered reincarnation, one can see myriad lives in the terrains of his abstract works from the years spent in India.
Imagine these gallery spaces housing the ghosts of regret and thrill, disappointment and loss. A chronology of Tracy’s studio development lines up closely with his biographical narrative. Beginning in 2003, his palette of saffron, orange, fuschia, and yellow-green ignite and evoke new dimensions of inspiration. From 2005 onward the India campaigns were inspired by the ornamental Delonix regia trees in Mumbai that blossomed before the seasonal rains. In those days, Tracy’s palette was formed by cataclysmic weather events, Vedic rituals that we witnessed along the banks of the Ganges, and butter rituals near Chennai on India’s southeastern coast. From 2006-2008 Tracy used somber tones like deep blue, gray, and silver, making reference to hardened surfaces like molten plasma turning to ash; in other series he depicted starbursts in an exuberant yellow-orange color (hence the title cempazuchitl, the Mexican word for marigold flowers), which were used symbolically in ritualistic cycles of death and rebirth in both Mexico and India.
Certain paintings from 2012 to 2021 point to Tracy’s return to Mexico as a changed pilgrim. His soul was forever altered, inspiring him to express gratitude to forms of beauty from before. Sacred objects of a younger artist are shown with newer works, to highlight a profound resonance between them, to produce a revival of sacred light. Why would it have been any different? The pilgrim, a voyager, travels many routes and distances - not in hopes of arriving at a new location - only to return to the same place as before. And this time as a personal renewal. What’s passed is past.
What does one call that awareness? How do they rinse its tears from their own? Perhaps they don't; they simply honor its distance in memory. Although German author W. G. Sebald is always remembered for his final novel Austerlitz (translated into English by Anthea Bell 2001), one of my favorite books was Campo Santo, a collection of prose published posthumously also in 2001. Jason Cowley wrote in a 2005 Guardian review that “Sebald is, above all else, an elegist. His lost men, emigrants and wandering solitaries tell of lives ended abruptly or displaced by the inexorable forces of history over which they have no control. Many of the people he writes about exist now only in photographs or as names on gravestones and memorials.”
As long as there is such distance between myself and my friend, there is nothing beyond elegy. Navigating this new frontier, another question arises: At what point does the emigre become an exile?
As I began to write this personal recollection for the McNay’s exhibition, Sebald’s book appeared to me in the former bedroom that Michael and I shared for decades, in exile together, where we’d usually recover from jet lag. The room is now a digitization suite for the Michael Tracy Foundation archives, but its walls bore many of the paintings in the museum installation. I finally understand that in the halls of my memory there are undiscovered corridors and alleyways that lead to streets and vast landscapes. These all seem to function now as foreign lands within my recollection. This is the topography that I see in these paintings. These are terrains that I no longer sail with Michael on a grounded arc in the desert, but I can never say never.
In my last dream of Michael, we were both shuttled through an airport terminal I didn’t recognize en route to a place neither of us had been before. Somehow, I could not find my boarding pass, and we were separated at security as I was led away for interrogation. I eventually boarded the flight but there were no more seats near him. We nodded at one another with a glance of reassurance that the journey, as always, would be fine.
