On a bleak, blustery winter day, I walked through a snowstorm to reach the grand opening of René Treviño’s Stab of Guilt at the Wellin. When I entered the foyer, I was greeted by a sensory wash of light and color, a warmth engendered both by the festive atmosphere and the layered vibrancy of Treviño’s work. The show is Treviño’s first retrospective, gathering 200 pieces from 2008 to the present, including works on paper created specifically for the exhibition. This included bright, playful remixes of star charts originally plotted by CHF Peters, Hamilton’s first professor of astronomy.

Stab of Guilt is an amalgamation of Western art history, Maya and Aztec ritual celebration, queer joy and resistance, and religious symbolism. It is an effusive and glamorous revision of history, in which objects and ideologies do not blend so much as coexist, raw and undiluted. The centerpiece of the exhibition, titled “Regalia, Intuition; Regalia, Premonition; Regalia, Foresight,” are three ceremonial outfits, tailored to resemble kingly robes, but resplendent with detailed, sequined embroidery and Azted-inspired feathered headdresses. Bejeweled patches — including flowers, snarling felines, butterflies, suns, and skulls — are arranged on rich brocade draped with faux jaguar fur and heavy tassels, recalling the campy extravagance of underground drag balls. Eccentric and eclectic, the display gives a paradoxical impression of carefully-cultivated spontaneity, a magnificent reproduction in literal form of the ritual pomp shared among distinct cultures. Inspired by far-ranging influences, from Gucci to traditional dances performed for tourists, the robes’ European and Mesoamerican sources proffer an idea of what may have been generated had these cultures merged and synergized rather than clashed. “A phrase that a lot of Mexicans like to identify with is this term Mestizo, which means mixed, or the mix between the European colonizer and the folks who were colonized. It is a complicated thing, but I think it is the way most Mexicans feel comfortable identifying themselves. Of course, that manifests itself in the work in that it is a mix of all these different things that I am pulling out to get at that final image,” explained Treviño in a 2023 interview.

Despite the larger-than-life grandiosity of “Regalia, Intuition; Regalia, Premonition; Regalia, Foresight,” my favorite display in the exhibition was the Circumference series, which employs the repeating motif of the circle to form a vast web of juxtaposed and interwoven imagery. Each work is hand-painted in acrylic, and presents a single circular object, including an Oreo, a laurel wreath, a sewer grate, a penny, a disco ball, an inscribed clay disc, and an Aztec relief. At once enigmatic and deeply familiar, divine and mundane, the series asks us to contemplate the interrelation of all iconography, from religious to commercial to artistic. The circle is a unit of infinity, and its use here allows us to see diverging cultures as continuous and fluid, circumscribed by the same preoccupations with form and shape. “My work is an attempt to make our already complicated history even more complicated. The more layers that I present, the closer I can get to something that might resemble truth,” writes Treviño in his artist statement.

The circular motif is used again in “Celestial Body-ody-ody,” which takes its name from a Megan Thee Stallion song. One of the great successes of Treviño’s work is his ability to be both flippant and sincere. In inviting pop culture into the art world, Treviño speaks to the electric current that ties performance to belief. Puckishly riffing on his works’ recurring themes, Treviño matches his pop-art-esque sensibility with an apprising, ruminative consideration of colonial legacies — an aspect which can also be seen in his bedazzled reinterpretations, in leather, of Mesoamerican codices. Comprising painted images of planets, constellations, organic forms and intricate modern and pre-modern artwork, “Celestial Body-ody-ody,” “metaphorically decolonize[s] particular spaces or question[s] institutional claims of ownership over objects and environment.” The museum label further explains that “the display of several celestial bodies — often bearing the names of their discoverers — points out the irony of individuals claiming planets, moons, and portions of the cosmos they will never visit.” What is most appealing about this series is the deftness with which Treviño handles color, texture, and graphics. Rhea is luminous and frothy, while Moche Burials positions white skeletons on deep, almost liquid, purple background.

An unavoidable limitation of the exhibition — a symptom of codified museum culture — is that it is resignedly visual. Pre-modern art was not condemned to mere viewership, but possessed functional, quotidien or ceremonial purposes. Statues were not representations of divine or royal figures, but acted as their literal instantiations, which could be fed, clothed and bathed. Archaeologist Zainab Bahrani identifies this as an “ambiguity between animate/inanimate, dead/living, real/imaginary, original/copy.” With so much of Treviño’s work focused on syncretism between past and present, it is unfortunate that museums unwittingly act as mainstays of colonial ideology, in which art is viewed, but not used, worn or touched. The very notion of “display” reduces living, breathing artwork back into objects, robbing ancient cultures of their original richness and fluidity. It is the very paradox of the museum as a preserver of culture that adds an edge of sardonic commentary to Treviño’s installation, making the title Stab of Guilt finally seem apt, even as Treviño’s joyful, concentrated, transformative exhibition runs circles around history and its normative ideals.