Ciudadela

A self-described "European with Mexican eyes," Gerzso expanded the visual horizons of mid-century Mexican modernism through his iconic abstractions, drawn in equal measure from his European adolescence and from a deep-seated, emotional response to the national landscape. The synthesis of modernist abstraction and pre-Hispanic art forms that defined his mature work was sparked during his first encounters with ancient Mexican art and archaeology in the later 1940s, kindled by conversations with friends and colleagues including Miguel Covarrubias, Wolfgang Paalen, and Paul Westheim. "The defining moment for me was the discovery of pre-Columbian art," Gerzso later emphasized. "I got passionate about its emotional and spiritual value. From then on, I sought to express the atmosphere of Mexico." Drawing inspiration from the rich textures and colors of his native land, Gerzso's paintings penetratingly channel the spiritual state and psychic imagination of the Mexican landscape. "I am not an abstract painter, but a landscape painter," Gerzso once reflected. "I am a great admirer of this country --of its culture and landscape--that is what influences my painting."[1]

The surreal quality of the land permeates the pictorial space of Ciudadela, which evocatively re-imagines the archaic forms and architecture of the Mesoamerican landscape. After 1946, Gerzso began to name his paintings after important pre-Hispanic sites, and Ciudadela likely recalls the fortress of the same name at the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacán, whose four-sided sunken plaza and pyramid are here re-imagined in the close-packed geometries nestled within two imposing vertical planes. "Gerzso further simplified the composition by leaving the background as an empty plane, enhancing this airiness by showing his subject as a negative image," curator Diana C. du Pont has noted of his work from the mid-1950s. "In Ciudadela, this reductive experiment translated into larger planes against which Gerzso set groupings of smaller faceted forms. The large planes begin to suggest landscape surrounding ruins. Gerzso achieved this association by detailing them with irregularly shaped, organic-like contours and by slicing into these planar surfaces in order to create visual motifs that appear as cracks and fissures in the earth's surface."[2]

One of Gerzso's classic early works, Ciudadela powerfully distills the literal architectural and cultural references of the landscape within a complex visual and spatial constellation. The clustering of interlocking and overlapping geometries suggests on the one hand a metaphorical excavation of Mexico's primitive past and on the other a means of containing and ordering the vastness of its land. The underlying architectonic structure, built through a Cubist faceting of space and Constructivist geometries, further evokes an enigmatic sense of depth and recession through a dynamic push-pull effect across the canvas surface. Contrasts of light and shadow, arranged in layered strata that penetrate deep beyond the picture plane, dramatically channel the colors, textures, and spaces of the local landscape from the warm, earthen desert tones to the vibrant blue-greens of the tropical highland forests. "For Gerzso the Mexican medium is not a pretext for easy picturesqueness," Wolfgang Paalen rightly remarked of his friend, but rather the genuine "reverberation of ancient glory and new promises."[3]

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park

1) Gerzso, quoted in Diana C. du Pont, Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2003), 110, 114.
2) Du Pont, Risking the Abstract, 121.
3) Wolfgang Paalen, quoted in Risking the Abstract, 111.