Interview with Dr.Lakra

The name — Dr. Lakra — conjures up images of a B-movie mad scientist. The art may be even stranger. Vintage Mexican magazine pinups and luchador photo spreads are the canvas for Dr. Lakra’s dense web of symbols and provocations.

In person, however, the tattoo artist born Jerónimo López Ramírez is small and soft-spoken as he banters with the crew helping him paint a wall-size mural for his first American solo show, “Dr. Lakra,’’ at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Sure, he’s wearing Chuck Taylors and earrings and a T-shirt with a skull front and center, but so are half the undergraduates in Harvard Square. It’s not until you catch a glimpse of the elaborate inking that starts on the back of his hands and rolls up under his cuffs that you get a sense of the world Dr. Lakra comes from.

“I was fascinated by the idea of having a permanent drawing on the body,’’ Lakra, 38, said over sandwiches in an ICA conference room. “It was like making a ritual or something, so I was fascinated with this at 16 or 17.’’

Tattooing still was something of an outcast’s brand. Lakra was into horror movies and metal bands, rebelling against the orderly Roman Catholic culture around him in Oaxaca, Mexico. “I think most of my friends who had tattoos were bigger than me, and I wanted to belong to those people. . . . I wanted to belong to a certain gang.’’

The son of Mexican-born painter Francisco Toledo, Lakra had studied with artist Gabriel Orozco and was thinking of becoming a comic book artist, until a new idea took shape.

“People tattooing in Mexico were doing it with homemade machines,’’ he said. “I went and got the stuff and built myself a machine, and then I didn’t know exactly how to use it. It was totally different. I had to learn how to draw again with this machine.’’

Learn he did, and his reputation as a tattoo artist grew rapidly in the 1990s. The “Dr.’’ in his name came from his habit of carrying tattoo equipment in a black bag. The ICA’s press kit says “lakra’’ is slang for “delinquent,’’ but it can also mean “scar’’ or “scum,’’ the residue of something nasty — a meaning the artist endorses with a rare laugh.

Eventually though, his tattoos may have become too popular.“I was working for two years in this shop — it was like McDonald’s, we go as fast as we can make it. I think one day I made, like, 25 tattoos in one day, and I reached a point where I wasn’t interested in doing tattoo for a living, and I decided to do more painting,’’ he said.

With tattoos, you have to please the customer. Painting freed him to follow his imagination, with the help of the vintage magazines he’d been casually collecting since he was a teen. And he quickly found success. His paintings are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and have been shown at London’s Tate Modern and elsewhere. He has traveled extensively exploring tattoo culture, and his paintings may reference the body art of the Maori people or pre-Columbian images.

“This is about culture, belief, traditions,’’ said independent curator Pedro Alonzo, who organized the show with assistance from ICA curatorial associate Bridget Hanson. “I think that is the most fascinating part of Lakra’s work, that it’s dealing with common themes across cultures.’’

The retro images from vintage magazines, Alonzo said, hark back to an era when society was much more rigid. “Him using tattooing and the stigma associated with it on those figures, who would at that time never have had a tattoo, that is really challenging the nostalgia for that brilliant bygone era, and that is brilliant,’’ Alonzo said.

Lakra rolled his eyes at the compliment, and they both laughed. The artist said he feels like a visitor in the art world. Back home in Oaxaca, in his studio, he has a corner where he still sometimes tattoos.



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