ART : The Artist as Vagabond : Mexican artist Alejandro Colunga places himself in the world of suffering to illuminate life’s tragic comedy

At first glance, Alejandro Colunga appears the quintessential ‘90s bohemian. With his thin mustache, monk-style haircut, red ascot, blue jeans and black boots, he looks every inch the elegant cosmopolitan. As someone who spends as much time in Rajasthan, a northern province in India, as he does in Bahia, Brazil, or New York City, Colunga has refined an aura of hip languor. It’s as though he knows the world and all that’s in it, perhaps too well. Almost as an admission, he explains that he is a vagabond. “I am not married. No children. No cat. No parrot. No nothing.”

But, little by little, sitting in a viewing room at a gallery in Santa Monica, Colunga becomes animated over the chance to define his artistic vision. Gradually, another side of the man slips out: the artist devoted to his art and to exposing the reality concealed behind appearance.

“I see the contrasts behind the mask,” he says. “I feel the contrasts between day and night, light and darkness, evil and good. At some point, you have to pull off the mask and see yourself for who you are, and that’s who you must accept.”

The 43-year-old Guadalajara native has been considered part of Mexico’s avant-garde for almost a quarter of a century. He has participated in group exhibitions and solo shows throughout the world, including the United States, France and Brazil. Fortunately for the curious, many of his most arresting paintings are on display in “Aspects of Contemporary Mexican Painting” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. (Two of his sculptures were also seen in “Towards a New Antiquity of Form” at the recently closed Parallel Project Gallery.)

Beneath Colunga’s world-weary, even soulless mask is a complex and impassioned artist. Beyond the dissolute air that shrouds him like a mourning veil he remains committed to his work and the people it touches.

“My only desire is to give love to the people who receive my work,” he explains. “Pain is an act of love. You can find yourself through pain.”

These coexistent opposites are often delicately depicted in his work by a skillful layering of media and meaning. In “Luna Crucificada” (Crucified Moon), a 1990 oil on canvas (recently seen at Iturralde Gallery), Colunga combines the Christ motif of the Crucifixion with a theatrical setting of pain. The moon is a doll, soft and round, like a porcelain figurine too awkward and too large to dance in the small world in which she finds herself. Framed by crimson curtains that define her stage-world, she faces us with her hands and feet nailed in place. This is the cosmic artist, too sensitive, with more to give than her surreal environment can receive.

But there is more. Not only is the crucified moon doll wounded, but the art itself is suffering. Colunga works feverishly when he paints, often painting at once with both hands layering the canvas with thick paint upon paint. Afterward he takes a paint knife to uncover the layers beneath. The effect here is that of a lacerated medium as well as a martyred lunar being. In a very subtle sense this is art at its most violent and violated.

“Crucified Moon” has its counterpoint in the painting “Nino Cabalgando a la Luna” (Child Riding to the Moon), one of nine works at the Santa Monica Museum. Here we see another tormented lunarian being caught in an exquisite dream world. Where the moon doll was crucified to the heavens, this half-moon-headed creature with a sad clown face, tiny sharp teeth and incongruous tennis shoes is grounded on Earth, too big to ride the small hobbyhorse that seems his only means of escape. Even a nearby solitary airplane is dwarfed by this bizarre moon-strosity with its mantle of thorns.

Obviously, the title is meant to be ironic. Like a wayward, supplicant saint, its face is turned upward as though imploring an unseen god for salvation. The only possible escape for this man-child is through the flight of imagination. Placed by the artist against a giant blue sun, this entity is isolation itself.

Architecture is Colunga’s uttermost aesthetic mask. This is his hidden medium. He uses architectural devices to create the artifice of theater and entrap images of the world’s madness. His art is the art of interior space.

In “Christ Without His Cross,” the artist has painted a black Jesus bloodied and crowned by his thorns. Again the figure is defined by a proscenium. This time it’s blue roses on an archway, then another arch of faded red roses and finally a suggestion of stage curtains. The space of pain and suffering is thus doubled and tripled. In Colunga’s vision of the world, the artist is the holy stoic on the altar of eternity.

There is a universality here that crosses cultures as well as time and space. For Colunga, the artist as enigma who creates chambers of beautiful suffering, life is a game.

“We all play the game,” he says with a mysterious smile. “We each have a role.”

In much of his work there is the subtle but total synthesis of everything that came before in Mexican art. His sculpture is almost statuary and clearly the descendant of ancient pre-Columbian art. Edward J. Sullivan, who curated the “Aspects” show, has said that Colunga “perhaps better than any artist since Frida Kahlo is able to capture the tragicomic essence of the country that Andre Breton called ‘a Surrealist place par excellence.’ ”

But to categorize Colunga as a “Mexican artist” is to miss what is most impressive in his work. In his sculptures, installations and canvas art, there is an air of haunting timelessness. He offers an enigmatic expression of late-20th-Century sensibility as well as a glimpse into multiculturalism in its most global sense. Given his basic peripatetic nature, he can draw upon a deep pool of diverse influences: the circus, voodoo rites of Brazil, Hindu mysticism and popular culture.

At age 24, after spending several years studying architecture and music, he joined the circus on an impulse. “Why not?” he says with a wave of his hand. “I was a clown. I cleaned the animals. The elephants. I worked in the kitchen. It was a very dramatic and magic world. But I always knew I would be an artist. I was born an artist. When I was a child, I pretended to be an artist, not an engineer or a doctor.

“I was 6 or 7 when I saw the film ‘Houdini,’ the one with Tony Curtis,” Colunga says. “Most of all, I remember the scene when he is dropped into the water wrapped in chains and a straitjacket. As he sunk down into the sea I also experienced anxiety and panic. I felt the asphyxiation of the actor.”

That agonizing image of the bound magician together with regular childhood visits to the cathedral in Guadalajara inspired Colunga’s “Houdini” series. One piece from the series is a spellbinding installation that has a sculpted Houdini wrapped like a mummy and hanging by chains, with a crown of thorns around his head in a chamber of brackish water. As Colunga says: “For me, Houdini means pain.”

This is literally the depths of despair. Small fish, oblivious to the corpse among them, swim casually around the dangling body, whose face is forever racked by a frozen grimace of pain. The counterpoints of life and death are literally captured and placed on view. The fish probably represent human beings who live in the ocean of life without ever acknowledging the constant and monstrous presence of death.

To further heighten the aura of dread and distress, the watertight glass rectangular chamber has spikes protruding from it. That means that we too could be injured if we venture too close. For good measure the upright tank sits on a heavy, seemingly immovable base. It’s as though it has been sitting in the sea, a sunken treasure from a lost culture.

Never satisfied to merely imagine a work, Colunga had himself thrown into a pool of water wrapped like Houdini so he could actually experience what the magician went through.

“It was terrible, like death,” he explains. “But I had to do it just for the feeling.”

Perhaps the supreme statement of pain in Colunga’s “Houdini” series is the eerie, somewhat unnerving yet strangely hope-filled “The Funeral of Houdini.” It brings together two key influences in his art: the magician and Christ.

As the artist says: “I grew up in a very religious family. I was always surrounded by the very rich ritualistic art of Catholicism. It had a very deep influence on my life. It was a beautiful and magical world. I took the symbols and transformed them.”

Colunga likes to tell of his visits to the cathedral as a child. He was particularly struck, he says, by a glass coffin with a wooden Christ inside and another one that contains the actual body of St. Inocencia.

With the idea of these graven images stored deep in his personal iconography, he created the “Funeral” Houdini. Again the magician’s corpse is encased in a tank of water with swimming fish. This time it lies supine its head wearing a crown of thorns. The water here seems to be a healing agent. It is a liquid capsule of utter stillness. Water often represents immortality, and that might mean the survival of consciousness despite the agonies of life and death. Where the hung Houdini was pure pain, there is a peace to this watery grave.

In a touch of dark humor, the whole coffin itself “wears” another crown of thorns at the left-hand corner of the triangular, pyramidally shaped top. Behind the glass coffin is a canvas showing the magician’s spirit floating up to the cosmos.

This is martyrdom and an indication of the artist’s sense of himself. This is also Houdini as Christ and vice versa. The Christ who performed miracles is like the magician, who before large audiences conjured miraculous escapes from near-death circumstances. But, even more, this is the artist as martyr. During an interview, Colunga says that art is magic. If so, then the artist is a magician.

“In art you cross the line,” he explains in the soft tones of a native Spanish speaker who rounds off the harsh consonants of English. “There is magic in what you feel when you cross the line from the normal world to the other. I love to travel, not just physically, but also to the other side of reality.”

India may well hold a key to the force behind the artist’s work.

“I go there to absorb the atmosphere,” Colunga says. “I can still sense the faint traces of the distant past, another time, blended with the shape of the present. It’s another world, and it changed my life forever. Before my encounter with India, my life was a disaster. It’s still a disaster, but I feel more content.

“What I found there was that this is a world of impermanence. Everything changes every second. Humans have to realize how small we are. We must think in centuries. People think they are going to live forever.

“They are going to live a second!” he says with a snap of his fingers.