[1][1]"Paisaje: Ixchel", oil on masonite, 32 x 25 3/4", 1996.
(Latin American Masters, Beverly
Hills) The conflicted identity of Mexican painting from the 1930s to the
1950s, when that art tried to locate a distinctly Mexican voice, is part
of Latin art lore, "lore" being critical notions that are referenced
often and superficially.
The tiered tensions--psychological, formal, spiritual--housed in that identity
crisis animate and render comprehensible work as diverse as that of Diego
Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Manuel Alvarez Bravo--and Gunther Gerzso.
Twenty-five paintings by Gerzso dating from the 1960s to the present are
on view in the current exhibition.
Born in 1915, Gerzso initially made his career not in art but set designing
and art directing for film. His late entry into painting during the 1950s
makes the depth of his body of work the more noteworthy.
The issue for Gerzso was how to honor an essential Mexican world view he
almost couldn't help but voice--reaching back to the Mayans, forward to
Zapata--while partaking of the European avant garde, with all its inroads
into formal theory, clarity of structure, expression via abstract markers
like color, gesture, line, etc.
Politically left artists like Rivera resolved the issue by becoming stauch
social realists. That this cultured, cosmopolitan with Delacroix watercolors
in his boyhood room could not bring himself to that solution is not surprising.
The tensions in Gerszo between European modernism's hunt for platonic structure,
the resonant edge, some universal order in art to hold off time, set as
they are against the expressive fervor, erotic and mystical ambiguity, Mexican
preoccupation, comfort with the mystery of life and death give these canvases
their power.
Not only was Gerzso committed to abstraction via influences like Corbus-ier,
Braque and Klee; he came into his own when people like Breton, Carring-ton
and Bunel were bringing the ideas of French surrealism to Mexican art. There
is in this work a comfortable but inventive confluence between surrealism
and the Mexican preoccupation for life as a dream time, for the thin but
impenetrable veil between this world (time) and the next (timelessness).
The works on view use a superficially European rectilinear language, softened
and kneaded to very expressive ends. A closer look will reveal a remarkably
subtle polyglot aesthetic that in the best works, such as Aparicion
(1960), is too inventive and personal to be called derivative.
In Verde, Azul (1989) cubistically receding geometries sculpted from
reined-in color are covered over and compressed by large "walls"
of opaque hue. Broad areas of light and hue aren't strictly planar. They
mound up and dip in like a navel on soft pelvic skin, they are ripped by
small, expertly
drafted scars, they bend and break off oddly to suggest dried mesas.
There is not a calavera in sight here, yet Gerzso gives us the same timeless,
eternal churning of eros, the fecund promise hidden in parched land, life
as some walking dream, themes from such disparate respositories as the Mayan
goddess of death, the hallways of de Chirico, the prints of Posada, and
the early poems of a young Octavio Paz.
