‘Visual Voices of Mexico’ Blends Into Symphonic Whole

Through the 20th century, while much of the art world assumed a neutral patina of internationalism, Mexico nurtured her archetypal uniqueness. The point is exceptionally well made in “Visual Voices of Mexico/Voces Visuales de Mexico” at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. A melange of 120 examples of pre-Columbian, folkloric and modern works, the exhibition comes off as a kind of epic poem about the Mexican psyche.

The show includes artists as well known as Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Frida Kahlo, but it is clearly not intended as an anthology of Mexico’s Greatest Hits. Individual voices are pitched, first, to enhance one of five thematic groupings, and then to blend into a symphonic whole.

No one familiar with Mexico’s art will be surprised that the opening leitmotif is “Life.” The show reminds us that the most natural artistic blend of life’s elemental forces--earth, air, fire and water--happens in ceramics, arguably Mexico’s hallmark artform. The persistence of clay art, from a prehistoric kneeling nude from the Tumbas culture to Saul Kaminer’s 1998 “Nest,” makes the point. More important, the way clay art closes the gap between fact and metaphor reveals the essence of the Mexican aesthetic.

In all media, this is an art in which everything leaches into everything else. When Nahum B. Zenil makes a ceramic heart, it’s simultaneously the symbol of love and the mechanism that pumps blood. In the section devoted to “The Sacred,” religion permeates into ritual and ritual into fetish. In Louis Carlos Bernal’s photo “The Queen of My Life,” a man shows us his back tattooed with the Virgin of Guadalupe in its vulvaform border. Paintings of blindfolded women cast them as both victims and deceivers. Ana Pellicer’s “Ocumicho’s Statue of Liberty” conflates North America’s symbol of compassionate freedom with a sword-wielding pre-Columbian goddess whose body is made up of myriad angelic heads, possibly severed.

“Fiesta” and “Myth” come next, although Mexican culture is so deeply wedded to the idea of the fiesta-as-catharsis and myth-as-solace that maybe any attempt to represent them is bound to fall short. Julio Galan’s painting “The Accomplices” captures only some of carnival’s incipient violence. Adolfo Best Maugard’s “Zapata” emanates a certain hero-worship-ing hypnotic fascination. In these sections, the exhibition seems to hesitate between passion and irony.

If this kind of rumination on Mexico must start with life, it has to end with death. At this point we expect the usual parade of Day of the Dead skeletons, with their inevitable combination of humor and spookiness. Instead we’re confronted by a less familiar tradition--images of dead infants. Kahlo’s painting “Little Dead Dimas Rosas at Age 3, 1937” is most artistically prepossessing.

Other images of cherubic little corpses with their serene, resigned mothers--so trusting in the afterlife--are touching in ways that may be beyond the grasp of secular North Americans. These photographs may leave them with the sense that all their advantages exclude something crucial that this art understands.

The traveling exhibition is accompanied by a 200-page bilingual catalog and was selected by independent curator Mercedes Iturbe under the auspices of Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Relations.

* “Visual Voices of Mexico/Voces Visuales de Mexico,” Museum of Latin American Art, 628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach; (562) 437-1689. Through Feb. 6.