Artist Daniel Lezama's controversial works

Note: Some of the paintings in this Web gallery include images that are explicit in their depiction of nudity and brutal elements of life in Mexico.

Which adjective best fits the work of painter Daniel Lezama? Alluring? Repellent? Classical? Irreverent? Misunderstood? While critics extol his daring and originality, Lezama, 40, makes certain gallery owners squeamish and collectors nervous. His typically large-scale works are imposing in their size and complexity, startling in their frank depictions of frequently nude, mainly working-class Mexicans (including children) engaged in activities that are simultaneously violent and sordid, touching and tender.

Read more about Lezama in Times Staff Writer Reed Johnson recent Sunday Calendar story. What follows is a closer look at Lezama's work:

Here, the artist poses in front of a painting titled "Amor Eterno," part of the exhibit "La Madre Prodiga," showing through the end of June at the Mexico City Museum. Stylistically and thematically, Lezama’s art straddles several eras, making some observers regard him as a backward-looking figurative painter, while others see him as a contemporary iconoclast. In truth, he’s a thoroughly modern anti-modernist or, as Erick Castillo, curator of the exhibit, has described him, a “traditionalist heretic working for the nocturnal legacy of the Mexican unconsciousness.”