ART : Monterrey’s Grand Entrance : The first show at a new, architecturally impressive contemporary art space in Mexico displays the museum’s international potential

The recent openings of two prominent museum buildings in two of the world’s great art capitals have generated wide notice. Culturally, both are of international significance.

The new Sainsbury Wing at London’s National Gallery has offered much-needed breathing space to one of the great collections of Renaissance painting. Across the Channel, in Paris, the Louvre Museum’s Jeu de Paume, formerly home to crowd-pleasing Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, has been refurbished as a showcase for contemporary art.

Given the stature of the National Gallery and the Louvre, it may seem wildly inappropriate even to consider these auspicious debuts in the same breath with the nearly simultaneous inauguration of a brand-new museum that can claim virtually no track record, and that stands in a city very far from any beaten art path. But consider it we should. For the new Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, which has opened in this northern Mexican city after a construction delay of several months, is a phenomenon whose potential for significant international impact is indisputable.

MARCO, as its acronymic nickname goes, intends to be heard.

In Mexico and the rest of Latin America, there’s no doubt it will. MARCO is easily the largest and most imposing institution of its kind south of the United States. (Its nearest rival would be the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City, which is privately operated by the communications giant Televisa, owned by Emilio Azcarraga.) The museum means to encompass the recent art of the Western Hemisphere, with particular emphasis on Latin America, generally, and Mexico, in particular. Almost everything about MARCO and its inaugural exhibition has been done on a grand and sumptuous scale.

The new building is conspicuously located on the main plaza of this prosperous, industrial metropolis (population: 3 million), occupying a busy intersection between city hall and the main cathedral. Its architect--Mexico City’s Ricardo Legorreta--is the country’s most celebrated living designer, a colleague of the late Luis Barragan and a rising star on the international scene. Prominently displayed out front is the museum’s identifying logo: a stylized, bronze, 20-foot-tall sculpture of a dove by the populist Mexican sculptor Juan Soriano.

The two-story, $11-million edifice encompasses about 110,000 square feet, a space considerably larger than the California Plaza building that houses L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Fully half the structure is devoted to 14 galleries, which yield more exhibition space than will be found in the L.A. County Museum of Art’s Anderson Building. The huge inaugural show, “Myth and Magic in America: The Eighties,” fills every available square inch of wall space--and even some space that is not so available, given a salon-style installation that sometimes crowds paintings from floor to ceiling.

This international reckoning of figurative painters who came to regional or international prominence during the 1980s boasts more than 300 works by 60 artists from 17 nations. Its hefty catalogue, illustrating every work in color and featuring a half-dozen essays, is fatter than Monterrey’s telephone book.

MARCO is clearly designed to impress and it does. That is not to say the new museum doesn’t have its problems (more about some of those in a moment). But, as with any institution of its kind, we are dealing here with civic symbolism, with a display of cultural perception of self.

For the city and the nation, MARCO has something to say about where Mexico stands and where it is headed. Like “Mexico: Splendors of 30 Centuries”--the huge historical exhibition that was organized by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art last fall and arrives at LACMA in October--the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo has a distinctly political dimension.

Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, hails from Nuevo Leon, the vast border state of which Monterrey is the capital. Salinas’ rise to political power has been tied to his vigorous championship of privatization in the Mexican economy. Because Monterrey is an industrial powerhouse--iron, steel, beer, textiles--it is an important center both economically and symbolically. (Flapping banners, which tout a local politician with the slogan “Un Nuevo Nuevo Leon,” currently festoon the city.) MARCO emerges as one notable intersection between the two.

MARCO was organized and has been funded by an unusual partnership of private and government leaders. Nine of the 12 board members who oversee the museum are prominent local art collectors and philanthropists; the remainder are representatives of state government. At least four of the nine private citizens--including the museum’s erudite president, Diego Sada, former chief executive officer of a division of the powerful conglomerate Grupo Alfa--are related by birth or marriage.

The museum is directed by Fernando Trevino Lozano, an MBA from the University of Wisconsin whose duties are administrative and fiscal. There is no curatorial staff. For the foreseeable future, plans are to rely on guest curators to organize exhibitions determined by the board.

The inaugural show of recent painting was assembled by such a duo: Miguel Cervantes, who also acted as consultant to the Metropolitan’s Mexican art extravaganza, and Australian-born free-lance critic and curator Charles Merewether.

It would seem that MARCO will operate rather like a private entity, albeit with some public oversight. The mix makes the building’s highly visible location smack between the rather shabby cathedral and the ugly, international-style city hall all the more resonant. The grouping is like a schematic time capsule of Mexican history after Cortes: the church as faded Colonial conqueror, the state as supposed modern savior, the capitalist entrepreneur as shiny new messiah.

Legorreta’s spectacular design for the museum features a variety of pleasantly scaled rooms arrayed around an enormous two-story, sky-lit courtyard whose centerpiece is a broad, shallow pool surrounded by a colonnade. The traditional plan of a Spanish hacienda is here exploded to monumental public scale. Surmounted by a grand staircase, the vast courtyard is a great place to throw a party (as the opening-night gala proved), while art is off on the periphery.

Working from the precedent of his mentor Barragan, Legorreta has rendered this transformation of aristocratic tradition in sleek but luxurious modern style. For both, architecture turns on the sculpting of clear, vivid volumes of light-filled space, often in eccentric conjunction with one another, and Legorreta usually does his space carving with great skill. A palette including hot pink, brilliant yellow, violet-blue and subtle earth tones is scattered throughout the building. (The galleries, of course, are whitewalled.)

Windows are punctured cutouts in the walls, framing urban vistas as if they were living pictures. In one obvious homage, a tall, skinny window perfectly frames a tall, skinny monument on the plaza across the street. The orange, plinth-like structure, topped at night by a revolving green laser beam, is tellingly titled the Tower of Commerce and was designed by Barragan.

This framing window signals the building’s principal problem: Acts of architectural bravura can get in the way of the art. To carve the two-story window, the architect has had to make a second-story gallery into a kind of mezzanine; the wall surrounding the window thus becomes a vast two-story expanse finally unsuitable for hanging paintings--which have been installed there anyway.

A skylight in another room casts geometric patterns of sunlight down a high wall--and across the paintings of Luis Cruz Azaceta that hang on it. Upstairs a window opening onto an outdoor patio painted a shocking deep red bathes the gallery with a roseate hue, which doesn’t do much for the paintings of Gronk and Moico Yaker inside.

In a wild and witty theatrical gesture, every half-hour or so a torrent of water gushes furiously from a large hole in the wall adjacent to the central courtyard’s pool, as if a hidden sewer pipe had suddenly burst, or someone somewhere in the museum had just flushed. It’s a “fountain” unlike any other, and one whose art museum context made my mind careen toward Marcel Duchamp’s famous sculpture of a tipped-over urinal.

Plainly, Legorreta has pulled out all the stops, and the results are often arresting. The faceted, jewel-like brilliance of the architect’s complex spatial conjunctions keeps tugging at your attention. But, periodically, you just want the building to calm down so you can look at art.

For the inaugural exhibition, which continues through September, that isn’t always easy to do. The jampacked installation blurs Susan Rothenberg’s paintings into Ross Bleckner’s, stacks Dulce Maria Nunez’s atop one another and floats Attila Richard Lukacs’ 20 feet in the air, to be viewed from a perch on the aforementioned mezzanine.

The curators admirably meant to show every artist in some depth, with about five pictures each. But, even with the sizable gallery space, it’s far too much. Cutting the number of artists by as much as half could have meant a powerful presentation of concentrated effect. Instead, the 60-artist show feels relentless.

In fact, the sheer bulk of the show seems meant to give needed weight to its principal goal, which is to tilt the typical East-West axis of modern art, which spans the North Atlantic, to a North-South pole. On the brink of the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of the Hemisphere, the show gathers figurative painters working from Canada to Argentina--from “America” in the fullest and most apposite sense--rather than artists from the United States and Europe.

Some are first-rate. Even when the installation is problematic, most of the familiar artists from the United States shine: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bleckner, Eric Fischl, Lari Pittman, Rothenberg, David Salle, Julian Schnabel and Terry Winters. The two lesser-known painters who stand out are Julio Galan, Monterrey’s “hometown hero” (he’s given pride of place in the museum courtyard alongside big paintings by Keith Haring, Schnabel, Fischl and Brazil’s rising star, Daniel Senise), and, especially, Argentina’s Guillermo Kuitca.

Galan is 33 and has been showing in New York (where he lives part time) and Europe for several years. His highly decorated paintings are often populated by porcelain-skinned, doll-like heads, which are alternately dazed, abused, dreamy, violated or cut out with a pair of scissors. Clearly affected by the Neo-Expressionist juggernaut of the early ‘80s, Galan brings to its aggressive scale and mix of collaged ingredients a delicate, vaguely erotic aroma, tinged with apocalyptic overtones. (His work, along with that of seven others on view here, will be included in “Aspects of Contemporary Mexican Painting,” opening in November at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.)

Guillermo Kuitca is just 30, and only last year did he begin to show actively outside his native Buenos Aires. As with Galan, sex and the shudder of doom recur in Kuitca’s paintings, but in ways that feel far more personal and troubling, less self-consciously mannered, than the Mexican’s.

Kuitca often relies on a highly theatrical space for his crabbed images of desolate trauma, a sense of mandated public display that only makes the subject all the more harrowing. They’re like those grindingly awful dreams in which you discover you are walking down a crowded city street but have forgotten to put on your pants--albeit without any shred of those nightmares’ black humor.

Throughout the exhibition, debts to established or mainstream modern art are everywhere apparent. Sometimes the key is in very recent work, as in Canadian Catherine Everett’s virtual pastiches of Anselm Kiefer, or Brazilian Luis Zerbini’s amalgamations of Fischl and Malcolm Morley. Far more often it is in provincial adherence to principles of the European canon, especially the School of Paris. The show’s North-South emphasis can’t escape an East-West pull.

This shouldn’t be surprising, given “Myth and Magic’s” focus on the resurgence of figurative painting in the 1980s--a resurgence that was led by European artists. What is worth noting, however, is the way in which the curators have cast that resurgence as one dictated by, in Cervantes’ words, “regional inspirations and personal mythologies.”

We’ve heard those words before--especially in the Los Angeles art world of the 1970s, when the recession-buffeted center of New York seemed shaky and unstable, and the marginalized art of Everywhere Else seemed suddenly to have a chance.

Whether the recession-buffeted 1990s have anything to do with the similar aspirations now claimed by MARCO and its inaugural show is difficult to say. A few statistics are suggestive. Seventeen artists (unsurprisingly the largest contingent) hail from the United States, but 16 are from Mexico--together totaling more than half the show. Most of the former are art stars of the ‘80s, but virtually all who are not are of Asian, American Indian or, especially, Latino heritage (among them Hung Liu, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Juan Sanchez and the late Carlos Almaraz).

It’s also notable that marginality is here considered principally a matter of nationality. Women, who account for only 10 of the 60 artists at MARCO, are grossly underrepresented. I’ll leave it to you to ponder why just four work in all of Latin America (Guiomar Mesa paints in Bolivia, Leda Catunda in Brazil, and Rocio Maldonado and Nunez in Mexico).

Through emphasis, selection and sheer numbers, “Myth and Magic” pointedly means to situate traditionally marginalized culture in general--and Mexican culture in particular--on an equal footing with the established center. The show is something of a position paper. In this regard, it seems a perfect inaugural to represent the larger aspiration of the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey.

If MARCO is to fulfill its self-evident promise beyond the borders of Nuevo Leon and Mexico, however, position papers won’t be enough. Thus far, the museum has looked inward toward Mexico’s political situation at the end of the century, and has shaped itself accordingly. But the long, slow process of mounting convincing exhibitions, of building a substantive collection and, crucially, of participating in the international dialogue of contemporary art has only just begun.

With its firm philosophy of the merits of privatization, and without an independent curatorial staff in place, MARCO is betting on the money-men for enlightened artistic direction--and hoping against hope they turn out to possess the taste and erudition of Medicis.