Gunther Gerzso

Wolfgang Paalen

For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie sleekly and a light push should be enough to send them rolling. No, it can’t be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But even that is only appearance.
Franz Kafka

Gunther Gerzso’s recent work makes me think of Kafka for a certain quality of mood, and for a quality of prose which does not describe but circumscribes situations rather than locations of subjects.

There is “La Ciudad Perdida” (the lost city, as the painter titles one of his most revealing pictures): no city is named or outlined, but one knows immediately, here it had to be, here it might happen again. Still, we are in the twilight; no one can tell whether the lamps are not yet lit or have already grown dim for dawn. But then, one feels uncertain; perhaps, this city was never meant for illumination. For the windows look inside and are not made of glass, rather facets of blind crystals; transparent now and then, but most of the time clouded by thought, reflecting within themselves the dull glow of agates. The painter is not concerned with blueprints but with organic growth; here is no illusory distinction between matter and spirit. The cracks and crevices are as substantial as the structures and it is only a question of apprehension, whether the dark squares are holes or shadows. These landscapes are not to be trod by feet. Here the eye can wander endlessly through labyrinths whose enchanting power lies in their being square, unravelling through terrace-like levels.

The ores of an attentive mind grow slowly and a certain mineral patience is not out of place in a country where great sculptors of the past spent lifetimes to polish jades, obsidians and crystals.

Gunther Gerzso has spent most of his life in Mexico where he was born thirty-five years ago. He never attended an art school but reached his astonishing craftsmanship in ten years of lonely work. Like any significant painter of today he integrates his immediate sources of inspiration into a truly international language; for him the Mexican medium is not a pretext for easy picturesqueness but a reverberation of ancient glory and new promises. His titles are not labels but secret keys; when he calls a painting “Stela” or the “Tower of Astronomers,” the timeless presence of Mayan monuments is not merely remembered but brought into a visionary focus.

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.

But in a time of constant confusion between the great and the colossal, the strong and the loud, between knowledge and wisdom,-- who wants to listen to silent virtues?

Yet, if anything, art could provide an equivalent for what in the East is called meditation; and there is nothing we need more urgently. One is almost tempted to speak of the revolutionary value of silence, when artists everywhere turn into noisy escapists, making fools of themselves in the three-ring circus of politics, megalomania, and fake religion.

Sometimes it seems the battle of modern art has to be fought all over again--or, perhaps, it has only begun. The tidal waves of confusion have obliterated the clear-cut promontories and much aesthetic ivy has blurred the clean outlines. A stronger faith and a harder discipline will be needed when it is no more a matter to shock but to convince.

Gerzso has chosen the difficult road. The road where the goal has to be re-discovered at every turn, where the promised city is apt to become a mirage and the mirage a trap. But when the traveler does not know any more whether to burn or to carry his burden of images, someone will come to meet him and say: ecce pintor.

This remarkable essay, as apt today as it was in 1950, was written for the catalogue of Gerzso's first exhibition. It is reprinted here with the permission of Galería de Arte Mexicano.