Peeling Back the Layers of Abstraction

The intricacy of Gunther Gerzso’s style is immediately evident, but less so its eroticism. This fine retrospective at Latin American Masters Gallery, which covers four decades of painting, is revealing on both counts.

Born in Mexico City in 1915, Gerzso was schooled in Europe as a young man. He returned to Mexico in 1935 and pursued stage design, working on more than 200 films by Mexican, American and French directors, including Luis Bun~uel and John Ford. In 1940 he began painting in earnest, and in the mid-1940s encountered the Surrealists in exile, among them Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Wolfgang Paalen. This experience was to have an immediate impact upon Gerzso’s style--which has a way of sticking in your mind’s eye, even if you’re not sure you like it.

The paintings appear to be formulaic: thin planes of color, shaded at the edges, piled atop one another in architectonic fashion. Colors are arranged in terms of tonal gradation, in patterns that seem to have been mathematically derived. The complexity of the layering suggests a mechanistic rigor that is at odds with the Expressionist vernacular of much Latin American art.

And yet what’s most interesting is the way things willfully break down, the places where pictorial gaps suggest spaces beyond the picture plane. Geometric abstraction flirts with magic realism and makes a show of its irreverence.

Gerzso is also self-conscious about his debt to pre-Columbian architecture, and indeed the paintings allude to secret antechambers and hidden recesses. The most impressive ones play up their own illusionism, daring the viewer to peer through a tiny tear or ponder a bend in the pictorial fabric. In these works Gerzso reveals his fondness for mind games, pictures within pictures, doublings, reversals and his long-standing technique for expanding upon the language of abstraction.

* Latin American Masters Gallery, 264 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-4847, through June 1. Closed Sundays and Monday.

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Less Silly Rabbits: In their last incarnation, Nayland Blake’s sculptural stuffed bunny rabbits hauled coffins, performed black masses, engaged in illicit sex acts--and looked cute doing it. Innocuous despite their would-be perversity, these warm and fuzzy tableaux provide the point of departure for a somewhat less silly, bunny-centric showing at Christopher Grimes Gallery.

The installation is filled with gum ball machines dispensing rabbit pellets, framed issues of Playboy magazine, chocolate bunnies perching in chamber pots and dripping jars of Brer Rabbit syrup. If the previous work riffed on Freud’s notion of infantile sexuality, the new work seems much like a meditation upon repetition compulsion.

More accurately, perhaps it is about the seductions of synchronicity. Rabbits seem to turn up everywhere--as a pair of ears sketched onto the image of the Unabomber; in a photograph of the artist as a small boy, crouching to inspect one of the furry creatures more closely; or in a silhouette cut out of a photocopied article on erotic art in the age of AIDS.

Where bunnies are absent, rabbit holes appear: black, felt ones dangling from clothing racks, along with witches’ hats and plastic caldrons, or in the center of makeshift outdoor toilets complete with summer and winter flaps.

Of course, synchronicity is one of those things that materializes whenever you’ve decided it’s there. And in that sense, the bunny, despite its contrived ubiquity and obvious sexual connotations, is an incidental prop. Less a doppelganger than a device, it allows Blake to interrogate desire without being too threatening.

Perhaps an inspiration was Bugs Bunny, who was always cross-dressing, much to Elmer Fudd’s chagrin. And yet why step so gingerly? Blake was a more interesting artist in the days of his chilling restraint pieces, in which the gleaming hardware associated with bondage was orchestrated to embody both sexuality and repression. A sense of humor is rarely unwelcome, but it comes here at too great a cost.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through June 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.