Dark odysseys

STEPPING onto the grounds of his rustic estate, Cesar Menendez is master of all he surveys: the big wooden barn and well-tended gardens; the thriving corn and coffee plants; the horses, fighting cocks and gimlet-eyed guard dogs that patrol his property’s perimeter. At one far corner of the yard, a doorway beckons toward Menendez’s airy studio, packed floor to ceiling with his paintings and sculptures.

Any starving artist -- which Menendez most definitely is not -- might kill for such a sanctuary. As one of Central America’s most commercially and critically successful painters, Menendez has earned these fruits of his labors, and he’s clearly enjoying them. “This is my zone. San Salvador for me doesn’t exist,” he says, referring to the nation’s hectic capital, several miles distant. “Here, I am protected.”

Yes -- but from what? El Salvador’s problems are sadly familiar: crime, crushing poverty and corruption all persist like a low-grade fever years after a brutal civil war ended here. That would explain the high walls and heavy gates surrounding Menendez’s home.

But the artist isn’t walled off from the phantoms that stalk his mind, the dusky fantasies that alternately seduce and menace his viewers. A Menendez painting can lure you into a shadowy realm of enigmatic symbols and sensual encounters. It can bring you face to face with a grotesque bestiary of truncated horses, glowering dogs, sawed-off torsos. It can plunge you into nightmarish visions of ghostly steam engines and sinister merry-go-rounds. It can make you want to run for your life.

These obscure images emerge, literally, out of pitch darkness. Menendez starts each of his paintings in a similar manner, using a broad brush to swab the canvas with diluted black acrylic paint. He may leave the canvas this way for hours or even days before returning to brood over its visible shadows and chiaroscuro contours.

Menendez then shuts himself in his studio, sometimes for weeks or months at a time, painting like a madman. Gradually, the demons that have been lurking in the darkness find their way into the finished work.

Many of these figures are recurring characters: circus acrobats, centaurs. Beds make frequent cameo appearances, sometimes tumbling out of giant cyclone funnels.

“Surrealist” and “magic realist” are, not surprisingly, the terms most often affixed by critics to Menendez’s work. The artist, fiercely averse to aesthetic labels, disdains both. But he has acknowledged in interviews that he feels a spiritual kinship with the verve of Francis Bacon and the sensual longing of Edward Munch.

Certain of his works also admit his obvious debt to Symbolist painters such as Arnold Bocklin, whose uber-Romantic “Island of the Dead” (1880) inspired Menendez’s spooky Stygian homage, “Al Otro Lado de la Isla” (The Other Side of the Island).

It would be tempting to reduce Menendez’s dramatis personae to Freudian or Jungian shorthand. But his weird juxtapositions of imagery suggest something more peculiar and private, a “personal iconography,” as Gregorio Luke, director of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, has written. Trains and railroad stations, for example, have a particular resonance for Menendez because one of his grandfathers was a railroad worker.

“My vision is from the interior toward the outside, not from the outside toward the interior,” Menendez says. “It’s another manner of thinking, it’s a more intimate labor. It’s more a sentimental obligation, human, more strong with the woman, with the feminine sex. This motivates me a lot. Or it could be, these problems of mine, I try to transform them in paint. But they are very personal things.”

A range of responses

CAROL DAMIAN, a scholar at Florida International University, summed up the disturbing power of Menendez’s murky psychological stage sets in a catalog essay for an exhibition of his work last summer at MOLAA: “The contortions of Michelangelo’s slaves, diving angels of Bellini, noble horses of the kings, and harlequins of Pablo Picasso are deconstructed and forced to rematerialize in the twilight of his mythical visions. The circus becomes the location for death-defying performances, not fun, and trains traverse a landscape of solitude, decay and eternal yearnings.”

Southern California art critics were divided over the Long Beach show of 24 paintings, “Cesar Menendez: Cazador de Fantasias (Hunter of Fantasies).” Daniella Walsh, reviewing for the Orange County Register, praised the artist’s “complexly noir creative universe” and was impressed with the works’ “superb narrative plots and subplots, emotional intensity and technical virtuosity.” But reviewer David Pagel, writing for the Los Angeles Times, found the paintings dated, “bookish” and detached, with “overblown themes that ring hollow.”

Menendez was stung by the latter assessment. But when visited by a Times reporter and a photographer on a balmy afternoon some months ago, he was a gracious host, spending hours showing his house, discussing art and inviting his guests to join him for a midday meal put together by his Mexican cook. A Jack Russell terrier named Odilon bounded along at his heels. In the distance, a pet rooster bawled.

A big-boned man in large round glasses, Menendez sports a Falstaffian paunch that lends him the aura of a hale fellow well met. He is that, but he’s also free with his opinions, offering blunt, sometimes impolitic appraisals of the official High Art pantheon. He’s generous, however, in lauding those he admires, including Salvadoran artist Antonio Bonilla, Colombian painter Enrique Grau and Nicaraguan Roger Perez de la Rocha.

Although he says he was an activist in the past, Menendez now steers clear of politics. Earlier in his career he dealt with the Salvadoran civil war in such incendiary works as “Camino a Guazapa” (Road to Guazapa), a 1990 oil that depicts black helicopters swarming a mountain like a biblical plague of locusts under a molten sky. Later paintings served up sharp satirical commentary on social ills of the postwar era, in a manner that echoed the style of George Grosz and other 20th century German Expressionists. Like many countries that have suffered massive trauma, El Salvador harbors a vein of dark irony. “Here,” Menendez says, “the humor is cruel.”

But at this stage of life -- he is now in his early 50s -- Menendez has turned to face his inner demons. And while some still attempt to identify his work as pro-this or anti-that, Menendez eschews ideology.

“I’m not saying I am a communist, I am this, I am the other, ‘Long live the people,’ ” he says. “I never have been a radical ideologue. I don’t go with fanaticisms. Or it could be, with painting, yes, I’m very radical, in this sense, I’m very autocratic. If I consider another painter good, I am a friend of his. If he’s bad, he is not my friend.”

What constitutes a good painting, or good art, in Menendez’s view, is more a matter of craft and technique than of merely having a fashionable concept. He came to appreciate this distinction after arriving in New York City in 1981 armed with a scholarship to study painting with a disciple of the great Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell. “I was a very bad draftsman,” Menendez says of those apprentice years, “well, because here in this country [El Salvador] the school of drawing, there is none, there never has been.”

Over time, he says, as his drawing grew steadier, he abandoned abstraction in favor of representative and figurative painting, which has maintained its historically exalted status in Latin America.

A believer in fundamentals

MENENDEZ, who grew up in a small village in Sonsonate in the country’s western half, still appreciates the intrinsic worth of a well-made thing. He believes that installation art and conceptual art have led to a devaluation of traditional artistic craft, and he takes satisfaction in being able to draw human figures without using a model. “Artists of today say that it’s not necessary to know how to draw. Today, what has worth is the idea.”

At his age, Menendez says, his style isn’t going to change. Instead, he seems to be digging deeper into the fundamentals of his craft. He employs a live-in campesino artisan who is helping him to master age-old clay-potting skills and other native arts. His recent turn toward sculpture is a natural outgrowth of his hands-on approach to art-making.

Surrounded by his wife and two young children (a grown son is a filmmaker), and equipped with his own studio, servants and on-site supplies of food and firewood, Menendez seems to have achieved a Crusoe-like self-sufficiency, with space for his imagination to run wild. “I am bourgeois -- how brutal!” he jokes, “and a great bourgeois, thanks be to God that I am able to live from painting. And that I have the cojones in order to allow myself to live by painting ... and I have survived [by painting] 30 years.”

After lunch, the house tour ends where it began, in the long, antique-laden living room where a grand piano sits theatrically by a candelabra with six red candles. Ceiling track lighting casts a faint glow across Menendez’s grotesquely beautiful “Beatification of San Antonio,” one of the artist’s many hallucinations that decorate the space.

It’s difficult to tell whether the holy man’s expression conveys rapture or torment. But in either case, the light slashing across his gnarly hands and face is exquisitely rendered.

“For me, the religion is part of surrealism,” Menendez says, glancing at the saint. “It’s magic.”