Gunther Gerzso
80th Birthday Show

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Gunther Gerzso
Dore Ashton

Dedicated to the memory of Marta Traba

14. Southern Queen, 1963

So Gerzso is indeed Gerzso and nothing else, but how did he come to be Gerzso? Putting aside the natural endowment of all artists of value, there were certain circumstances that can be said to have prompted his choices. For one thing, although he was born in Mexico, he spent his formative years abroad. He had a cosmopolitan upbringing that brought him into contact with people, places and ideas that spoke to his temperament. He spent several years in the Swiss home of an uncle who had been a pupil of the great art historian Wölfflin. He even met the artist Paul Klee with whom, I believe, he has affinities-Klee who spoke of "the prehistory of the visible" and whose lectures and assignments to his pupils included one on "Earth, water and air." Although still a boy, Gerzso was precocious. He quickly recognized the importance of the writings of Le Corbusier given to him at his uncle's house. Not so strange an attraction if we think of Corbusier's sculptural flights as epitomized at Ronchamp. The tectonic impulse was natural to Gerzso and has played a strong part in his becoming Gerzso. Another impulse that I suspect was just as natural to his temperament was generated in Switzerland when the youth encountered an Italian actor and set designer who fired him with the ambition to create for the theater. Subsequently, the theater and later the cinema not only provided Gerzso with a means of support for many years, but also sharpened his perceptions. The man who designs the discrete world that each theater set must represent is required to rationalize illusion. His whole task is to abstract and accentuate in order to make a convincing whole. He must draw from the world of experience those elements that can give an absolute illusion of a place and a time. Very often those who write about Gerzso's work, in which he makes extensive use of overlapping planes, invoke the language of Cubism as the source. I think rather that it is Gerzso's long experience with flats and scrims that has tempered his pictorial idiom.

22. Verde-azul-amarillo, 1968

If I speak of Gerzso's initial formation as an independent painter, I must emphasize that it was his return to Mexico in 1942, after several years of being a resident set designer in the United States, that fortified his resolve. He returned to his birthplace, I suspect, with the express intention of making it his own; of coming to terms with its strangeness, its overwhelming feeling of profound apartness from all other Western culture. Even native-born Mexicans are aware of the peculiar otherness of Mexico, and in awe of it. Carlos Fuentes has spoken of all of Mexico as a "sacred zone," and Octavio Paz has written again and again of Mexico's unique heritage stemming from its unusual fusion of colonial and Indian elements. Gerzso was clearly smitten and inspired by his rediscovery of his native country. His enthusiasm was undoubtedly swiftly kindled by the presence of a small but infinitely important group of foreign painters and poets who had taken refuge, during the Second World War, in Mexico City. The whole story has yet to be told, but the heroic years of Surrealism in Mexico were to be definitive in its cultural evolution. The tremendous energy such people as Wolfgang Paalen and Leonora Carrington and the poet Benjamin Péret brought to Mexico City was unparalleled. This energy was quickly put into the service of the important esthetic battle against an ingrained and unchallenged habit of assuming, as most Mexicans did, that the art of the great generation of muralists was the only indigenous modern art possible. The Surrealist band, with their emphatic emphasis on free association and the importance of reverie, would be effective in opening a way for young artists to elude the mural tradition.

Gerzso profited by the momentary excitement. He soon came to know Wolfgang Paalen, a well-traveled and exuberant painter who had arrived in Mexico full of enthusiasm for the American indigenous traditions (he had first visited Alaska and the Pacific Northwest where he studied Indian arts). Paalen's response to the Mexican landscape reflected the Surrealist état d'âme even after he renounced certain Surrealist tenets. He wrote in a letter of "the sullen greatness of this high plateau ... its emptiness under a fathomless sky whose clouds are piled up so high that one grasps immediately the thirteen heavens of the Indian mythology..."

He quickly grasped Gerzso's individual adaptation of Surrealist juxtapositions, and when he wrote the catalogue foreword for Gerzso's first exhibition in 1950, he spoke of things that are still pertinent to Gerzso's vision:

It might seem strange to speak of Mayan monuments and Kafka in the same breath; yet the fathomless antechambers in the writer's castles, the walls of his imaginary China, can be sensed on the ascending terraces, in the endless vaults and pyramids of pre-Cortesian Mexico. There are no milestones in eternity, and the lonely men on their way from the lost city to the possible city have come to know that the nearest is also the farthest. For them, the ancient glyphs which can no longer be read, and the glyphs which cannot be read yet, are equally meaningful.

Certainly the monuments of the old Indian theologies with their rectilinear shapes and their uncanny perceptual effects are to this day engraved in Gerzso's imagination and peer out from his seemingly abstract works. The Surrealist point of view-for more than anything else, Surrealism was a point of view of existence-has remained germane to his creation.

No doubt Gerzso's flight into the interior (interior Mexico, interior Gerzso) was assisted by his friendship with an extraordinary poet, Benjamin Péret, with whom he became friendly toward 1944. Péret's exceptional personality, acknowledged by all who knew him, could not fail to have impressed the sensitive painter. He had come to Mexico with a grand ambition: to write a book on the myths, legends and popular fables of the Americas. The foreword to that book, La Parole est à Péret, was endorsed by distinguished writers and painters all over the world when it was published in 1943 (among them André Breton, Aimé Cesaire, René Magritte, Wifredo Lam, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst).

Péret wrote with tremendous conviction of the importance of the native imagination, dipping back into history to quote Goethe: "man cannot remain long in the conscious state and must plunge again and again into the unconscious because the root of his being dwells there." Péret invoked New Mexican kachina dolls and Mexican jade masks and insisted that "the marvelous is everywhere, of all times and of each instant." His poetry, with which Gerzso was intimately familiar, is, for all its Surrealist dislocations and abrupt transitions, remarkably close in spirit to the images of Gerzso, even those most akin to the tradition of KIee and Malevich (and KIee, it must be remembered, was much admired in the first Surrealist exhibition in 1925). Péret's poems written in Mexico are redolent with the imagery of the place. The Swirl of Dust for instance begins: "When stones slam their doors as a sign of despair" and finishes, "between vines digesting centuries would fill with thundering Americas hardly suspected in a comma." Even more startling, perhaps, is the prophetic poem written in the 1930s with the compelling first stanza:

Here begins the glacial house
where the roundness of the earth is only a word
as light as a leaf
whose quality matters little
In the glacial mansion dances
all that the movement of the earth cannot prevent from dancing
all the beings whose existence is improbable
There time is the same as the partition of an empire
as the long march of Lilliputians
as the cataract 1800 meters high

• (from Four Years After the Dog )

I dwell on the affinities between Péret and Gerzso because I believe that for all the apparent formal language in the paintings, and for all the knowing incorporation of the modern plastic idioms, Cubism, Constructivism, and even Surrealism (if we think of the abstract branch consisting of Miró and Gorky), Gerzso's paintings remain rooted in the Surre alist philosophy in which surprise and wonder, and dramatic heightening and otherness, are worshipped. Above all, the unaccustomed collisions of images. The important function of juxtaposition in the Surrealist theory is served admirably in Gerzso's paintings, as it is in Péret's poems. There are, for instance, enormous vistas in the work of both, and these vistas, seen from afar, have a millennial silence that, in Gerzso's paintings, prompted one of his most sensitive critics, Marta Traba, to write of "the zone of silence." Naturally, in the real Mexican landscape, there are birds, toads, jaguars, creatures that are making sounds. But in these paintings we are too far, too much in a reverie, to perceive them. Yet, just as Péret juxtaposes the great stones of Mexico with a line as fine as a comma, and just as he draws a glacial house remote from the roundness of the earth, only to invoke the dance with all its roundness, so Gerzso makes juxtapositions that could never be adequate ly assessed in purely formal, plastic terms.

I think Traba was right to see landscape as the central motif in Gerzso's life's work, and specifically, the Mexican landscape. His work as set designer for over two hundred Mexican films brought him to survey the entire country with an eye to wresting from the panorama a telling abstraction. Yet, this is a landscape of the mind, through which flows so many elements, not the least, the human image. Metamorphosis, another Surrealist value raised to the highest degree, plays its part in each of Gerzso's paintings. So do ambiguities, and secrets, that all writers on his work have felt reside behind the hard, luminous picture plane. Take only one of his paintings and linger with it: Landscape, Orange-Green-Blue of 1982.

We are confronted with a vast but bounded field of orange (not entirely opaque however-there are yellow and ocher undertones and flecks of ocher making the final plane vibrate). This field is, as are many fields in Gerzso's paintings, not only a field but a wall and also a curtain as might exist on the stage of an avant-garde drama. Within the field are four unattached lines, each with a nimbus, each as frail as a comma, and each providing the painting with a different scale. Now scale, as every painter knows, is a difficult problem. It is not just a matter of large and small. It must incur mysterious relationships. Klee never spoke of scale in itself. Rather, he spoke of "measuring and weighing." One can measure and weigh the plane of orange only as one measures the weightlessness of these threads of line. And temporality, as Klee insisted, enters. The time the eye takes to scan the plane is measured in terms of the fragile commencement in the line.

In this painting, as in many other recent paintings, Gerzso has again invoked the special qualities of line which can at once describe the final boundary of a form and suggest the life of the form behind. The shaded line, the swelling line, the diminishing line, the hairfine line serve him both to illuminate the character of his planar forms and to suggest mystery and depth. A pair of blue bars, overriding the orange plane in this painting are separated from it by delicate dark lines. These two blue bars, as musical as any of Klee's, set off another set of juxtapositions, and another, as the horizontal planes pass into infinity.

But it is not only a matter of the surprising juxtaposition of planes in different scales. Here, and I think in most of Gerzso's paintings, there is a specific surreal emphasis. The three dappled blue shapes, roughly rectangular, that ride on the very surface of the painting, are, in fact, windows, and the cool blue is nothing other than a Magritte-like allusion to sky. Glass, reflection, sky, boundaries, houses, inside, outside-how many associations does he not compress in this intense abstract painting by means of these unexpected illusions of the real. The cracked, window-like shape has existed in many of Gerzso's paintings, including works as long ago as 1965, and can be compared to other shapes in his paintings in which there is a deliberate, slashing rent-symbol of broken idols, shattered monuments, archaic memories of separation and even death.

23. Naranja-azul-verde, 1972

There are paintings that Gerzso has titled to refer us to the association with ancient Mexico, and others where the shapes, so firmly trapezoidal or rectilinear, inevitably evoke the architecture of the Mayans or the Aztecs. But there are others in which he gives us the clue to the reading that he calls "personage-landscape" (in Spanish it has its implicit poetic elision: personaje-paisaje). These are paintings in which the personage, as would a character in the theater, is all but hidden behind the coulisses. It is a presence. It exists in a vertical clatter of planar infinity, or on the vast plateau of Mexico, but always reticent, always masked. This personage is certainly Gerzso, who has diffused himself throughout his paintings, with only a few, but very telling clues to his physical being as a man. The process of masking; of layering memory (does he not call one of his paintings Ancient Abode, and suggest the living presence of himself and all others?) is carried out with a painter's rigor. Each plane secretes another. Each color makes another shine. Each line has its opposite. Everything in the world is firmly compressed. And behind, the vivid presence of the eye that discerns, that extends. Gerzso is certainly Gerzso and nothing else.

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