A uniquely Mexican Modernist

Initially, a canvas by the self-taught Mexican Modernist painter Gunther Gerzso might appear to be wholly abstract. Luminous shapes of carefully mottled color -- hard-edged, rectilinear and layered -- offer no immediate references to anything recognizable.

Slowly, though, that perception shifts. The flat plane of the painting melds with intimations of the surface of Earth and the skin of the human body. In Gerzso’s 1960 “Apparition,” for example, colorful blocks of crimson, orange and off-white interlock like the stones of an ancient temple or the sheer cliffs of an abyss. Thin, precise slices of black suggest deathly ritualistic cuts or a dimpled navel.

Skin, a painting and the land are all two-dimensional surfaces concealing inscrutable depths, where mysteries of life and death reside. Fragments of luminosity surrounded by engulfing darkness are the norm in this work, while architecture, a sheltering abstraction that mediates between the body and the environment, is frequently evoked. Gerzso’s easel paintings are abstract, but they also court a sense of metaphysical unease.

A sprawling exhibit at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art offers a welcome and revealing survey of the artist, who is not widely known outside his native country. He was born to European emigre parents in Mexico City in 1915, and he died there at 84 three years ago.

Curator Diana du Pont has assembled 122 paintings and works on paper for the first substantive analysis of Gerszo’s work in 30 years. (After closing in Santa Barbara on Oct. 19, it will travel to Mexico and Chicago.) The show contains surprises.

In 1963, no less a personage than Octavio Paz called Gerzso not merely the best abstract artist in Mexico but “one of the great Latin American painters,” period. The dramatic pronouncement requires some explaining.

For one thing, Gerzso was something of an outsider in the Mexican art world, where abstraction was looked upon with suspicion. Instead, recognizable imagery, whether Realist or Surrealist, represented modern orthodoxy. Even as late as 1990, the mammoth traveling blockbuster show “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries” included not one abstract painting in its survey of the nation’s modern era.

An outsider

Mexican nationalism and its populist orientation didn’t have much room for abstract art -- a prejudice that was further complicated by Gerzso, while actively socialist, not having an Indian or Spanish surname. Being self-taught as a painter left him outside the ranks of artists trained in academies supported by the government. And he initially established his reputation in the 1940s as a set designer in the Mexican movie industry. (He began to paint full time only around 1960, shortly before Paz’s statement.) His seriousness and depth of commitment were subject to question.

The Santa Barbara show begins with set designs and modest works on paper, in which Gerzso is teaching himself to draw. A riveting postmortem charcoal portrait of the assassinated anti-Stalinist hero Leon Trotsky beatifies him as a Christlike figure, with a subtle corona radiating from his head and a Communist star hovering over his chest.

Gerzso was also involved with the community of European artists in exile in Mexico City during World War II. Other figure studies of peasants and of apocalyptic scenes of terror partake of common European Expressionist and Surrealist currents of the day. Aesthetically, he’s all over the place.

His work starts to come together as a coherent expression around 1944, in small, derivative but beautifully articulated Surrealist paintings. Masked figures, spiky landscapes and other nightmarish elements are rendered in jewel tones emerging from the darkness.

New connections

These and other obvious references to the work of Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Wolfgang Paalen and, especially, Andre Masson were gone by the end of the decade. In their place, colorful architectonic clusters of flat rectangles glow mysteriously against ominous black and blue-black fields. Suggestions of the structural intricacies of Aztec temples, the sensual interlaces of Maya decorative motifs and other ancient forms of indigenous art are seamlessly merged with modern abstraction.

This work seems to take its gruff, dry surface appearance -- and a good deal of its interest in Mexican Indian ritual and traditions -- from the frescoes of Jose Clemente Orozco, an artist Gerzso greatly admired. What’s most interesting, though, is that Gerzso is merging two mythologies -- the mysterious legacy of ancient culture and an equally enigmatic Modernism.

In this, he’s like countless American artists in the late 1940s and 1950s. The moral catastrophe of the early 20th century, with its unspeakably brutal wars, the grinding inhumanity of the Depression and the bleak endgame posed by the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation, led the avant-garde to respond in a specific way.

Think of Gerzso’s paintings as describing a modern labyrinth, in which lurks a ferocious unseen Minotaur. The artist searched for ways to rebuild a modern world by starting over in a pre-modern one.

Steeped in Surrealism

The show demonstrates with some finality at least two things: First, Gerzso was slow to develop -- he didn’t reach his mature phase until well after World War II -- but he was no dilettante. And second, while abstraction was his language, throughout his life as a mature artist Surrealism provided his pictorial syntax.

Therein lies the problem with this art. Surrealism was the most widely disseminated aesthetic movement of the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1960s, Gerzso’s skill as a colorist is often dazzling (the distinctive look he achieved evokes a Parisian tradition of belle facture -- beautiful handling -- that’s both suave and sensual), but the Surrealist foundation of his painting also can’t help but seem old-fashioned, a repetitive relic of an earlier age.

Art in postwar Mexico -- as in postwar Los Angeles -- remains poorly examined and widely misunderstood. The handsomely installed Santa Barbara show, accompanied by an impressive and informative catalog, charts Gerzso’s career with care. It offers the kind of in-depth scrutiny of a significant if currently unfashionable figure that more museums ought to undertake.

A painting early in the show sets the tone for both the exhibit and the artist’s nascent career. The bust-length 1945 self-portrait shows him seated behind a table or a ledge on which he rests his arm, bent at the elbow. His forearm stands upright, parallel to the left edge of the canvas, like a flagpole that ends in an open hand.

A melancholic yet determined expression passes across the artist’s shaded face. Gerzso is showing his colors here. He puts his faith in what his hand might produce. It’s a moving and single-minded testament, rendered at a moment when the world had just collapsed.

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‘Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso’

Where: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara

When: Daily except Mondays

Ends: Oct. 19

Price: Adults, $7; 65 and older, $5; students with IDs and ages 6-17, $4; under 6, free

Contact: (805) 963-4364