Surrealist reality beyond reach

In its heyday, Surrealism was about as heady a movement as a bohemian could hope for. Bringing together painters, poets, politicos and pretenders, it produced groundbreaking work in art and literature and left behind outrageous stories about the characters who sustained its daily dramas (often with bitter infighting) for far longer than other 20th century movements.

Then ordinary life got weirder than anything Surrealism could cook up. Advertising delivered the knockout punch: Creating far-fetched juxtapositions and associations, it excited desire more promiscuously and denied logic more efficiently than the Surrealists. Beaten at its own game, the movement was done for by about the time Cesar Menendez was born, in 1954.

At the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, a 22-work survey of paintings and drawings by the Salvadoran artist revisits Surrealism’s triumphs and pitfalls. Contemporary artists often sift through history to find works that inspire them to make new and improved versions firmly rooted in the present. But Menendez’s art seems to want nothing more than to travel back to the early 20th century and stay there.

Menendez’s pictures drift gently into history. Standing before one of his faintly illuminated night scenes or shadowy interiors, it isn’t difficult to imagine that you’re in a Parisian atelier filled with works by a peripheral Surrealist from the 1930s -- not one of the big innovators, just a hard-working journeyman smitten by the idea of Surrealism but not talented enough to make it original.

Melancholy predominates. A moody, sometimes brooding detachment is almost palpable.

But that, too, is held back in bookish fashion. This makes for paintings so parsimonious as to be disembodied renditions of dreams whose power faded long before sunrise.

Menendez’s dryly painted pictures of shrouded figures, growling hellhounds and lumpen nudes are generic, clenched and stingy. Far less sensual than ethereal, they do not establish their presence in the world of flesh-and-blood reality but seem to hover just beyond reach, as if haunting the present like visitors from beyond the grave.

The distant quality comes off as a defense mechanism common to young artists and others who don’t believe their experiences have the gravitas required for art. In Menendez’s case, this leads to overblown themes that ring hollow. It’s a form of cerebral Surrealism -- and the brain was the one organ that didn’t interest the original Surrealists.

The 19 canvases in the 15-year survey fall into three groups. The first, painted from 1990 to 1997, consists of close-ups of isolated figures or distant views of groups scattered through landscapes.

The earliest painting, a portrait of St. Anthony, borrows directly -- and not so adeptly -- from Francis Bacon. It’s the only work with an explicitly religious subject. Others, with titles such as “Confessions” and “The Procession,” cast religious rites in secular terms. The first depicts a shirtless man gazing at his double reflection in a bathroom mirror. The second shows distant figures carrying a canopied platform through dark city streets.

The impression of suspended animation, or that everything is taking place in slow motion, is meant to evoke a dream state. But it suggests actors merely going through the motions, silently walking through their parts so the lighting designer can aim the spots in the right places.

This theatrical aspect is even more vivid in the three other canvases in this group, all of which resemble hand-painted backdrops for stage productions. All seem incomplete without actors performing before them. The most overwrought, “Memories for a New Century,” strives to marry Soviet Social Realism to Surrealism, a mismatched coupling if ever there was one.

The next group of paintings, from 2001 to 2003, leaves theater for movies. Keyed-up colors, rampant action, sci-fi fantasies and mind-bending scale shifts enter Menendez’s pictures. In one, smoky orange clashes with deep green as a contorted dog battles legions of aliens whose heads resemble air-intake scoops. In others, an angel dies ignominiously, a centaur writhes in pain and a pedestal-mounted statue pushes at a pair of pillars as if it were a mythical figure. All evoke a world of special effects.

The light in these works is their best feature. Some look as if lighted by faraway fires. Others appear to be in smog-choked underworlds. Still others seem illuminated by the poisonous glow of toxic dumps.

The last group of images combines the wide-open spaces of the first group with the lighting effects of the second. All were painted this year, and they show Menendez at his best. Locomotives, circus performers, merry-go-rounds and levitating nudes appear in these increasingly detailed paintings, whose fanciful setups have the presence of tabletop dioramas.

Evoking children’s toy allows Menendez to downplay, if not eliminate, the suffocating portent of his earlier works. Greater potential for playfulness resides in these pictures. This aligns them more closely with one of Surrealism’s best features.

No self-respecting Surrealist would have treated a historical precedent with Menendez’s seriousness. Risky irreverence, a love of the unexpected, sex and more sex was Surrealism’s stock in trade. Treating its works as classics to be studied to death misses the point.

The title of the survey, “Cesar Menendez: Hunter of Fantasies,” suggests a related shortcoming. At no time does a visitor to the exhibition feel as if he’s on safari. Exotic creatures big and small are here, but safely caged, as if in a zoo. The best fantasies are more elusive than anything that can be hunted down.

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‘Cesar Menendez: Hunter of Fantasies’

Where: Museum of Latin American Art, 628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach

When: 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Friday,

11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday,

11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday.

Ends: Through Oct. 17

Price: $3 and $5

Contact: (562) 437-1689