Gerardo Chavez Looks Both Into and Beyond His Culture

Time was when people looked at art mainly as a porthole to the artist’s soul. Recent emphasis on ethnic heritage, however, encourages audiences to expect a sense of the artist’s culture as well. This drift is particularly germane to “Gerardo Chavez: Rhythms of the Fantastic,” on view at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.

After somewhat uncertain beginnings, the Museum of Latin American Art has expanded, improved and is now a small museum to be reckoned with. Its mission--to educate a North American population in the pleasures and meanings of Latin American art--is admirable. Modernist art history hasn’t been generous to the genre. That may be changing. A recent news report noted that auction prices for such work rose tenfold in the past two decades.

Chavez’s 45-painting survey exhibition rewards a visit. Handsomely organized by the museum’s director of collections and exhibitions, Cynthia MacMullin, the U.S. debut of the 60ish artist reveals a widely exhibited veteran master who finds lyricism in the grotesque and vice versa. According to the current formula, that ought to throw some light on his Peruvian origins.

The country tends to be one of those murky places in the minds of even decently educated gringos. They may have a nice, clear historical memory of the magnificent Inca civilization plundered of its gold by Francisco Pizarro, but after that the usual blur of colonialism, unstable governments and military coups continues until very recent years. In 1990, the gifted Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa took the unusual step of running for president, only to be defeated by Alberto Fujimori, the son of Japanese immigrants.

The serendipity of all that resoaanates subtly in Chavez’s art. The largest work on view is his 40-foot “The Procession of the Potato.” Depicting a parade of absurdist embryonic cookie-cutter figures celebrating a giant spud, the brown monochrome composition is somehow, well, intestinal. According to an informative catalog essay by Douglas M. Hinkley, Chavez celebrates something every Peruvian knows--the humble potato originated in Peru, where there are at least 100 varieties. It has done the world more good than all the gold swiped by the conquistadors, nurturing Europe through famines and addicting us to French fries. How much irony Chavez intends by styling the potato as Peru’s great gift to humankind is anybody’s guess.

If his leanings to slapstick create the impression that this art’s a little gross, that’s wrong. Like Vargas Llosa, Chavez is nothing if not suavely sensuous even when painting monsters.

One look reveals an artist nurtured less by a regional sensibility than the supra-national culture of Modernism. In 1960, he went to Rome to study the Old Masters. There he met one of the rare South American artists to gain a place in both the Surrealist avant-garde and the beginnings of American Abstract Expressionism: Chilean-born Roberto Matta. Encouraged to join his century, Chavez was soon in Paris. He met Cuban painter Wifredo Lam and caught up with what was by then the enshrined classic Modernist canon. In fact, he now divides his time between homes in Paris and Trujillo, Peru.

Subsequent work is conservative by ‘60s vanguard standards. “Feast of the Sun” looks like an homage to Matta and Arshile Gorky. “The First Act” depicts a four-legged humanoid either being devoured by a grotesque beast or turning into one. It tips its hat to Francis Bacon but avoids the angst of his staccato brushwork. There’s an effortless virtuoso limpidity about Chavez’s art precluding any sense that he suffers in the doing.

He has Matta’s knack for painting creatures as if they’re made of some gelatinous, translucent ectoplasmic ooze. What should be repulsive comes across as oddly wondrous. At times Chavez evokes a cinematic special-effects guy gifted in making flesh melt off skeletons for Indiana Jones movies. We’re saved from grossing out by his gentle pastel palette.

In later, darker work, Hieronymous Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” is repeatedly suggested by figures falling in purgatorial space. An implicit suggestion of chaos is arrested because Chavez organizes undefined background areas into abstract compositions that are beautiful in themselves.

Legitimate questions about differing cultural sensibilities are set loose in this exhibition. A latent Puritanical streak that tends to grip North Americans might find this work paradoxically too entertaining and decorative while conversely sadistic and sentimental. So much said, it strikes me that Chavez’s larger mission is to somehow fuse these contradictions. It doesn’t always work, but when it does his art generates something like a mesmerizing unearthly synthesizer music with a Latin carnival beat--the “fantastic rhythms” of the title.

* “Gerardo Chavez: Rhythms of the Fantastic,” Museum of Latin American Art, 628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach, (562) 901-9162. Ends Sept. 12. Closed Mondays.