A few artists in the Mexican Museum’s “Maestros: 20th Century Mexican Masters” merit the slightly grandiose claim that the exhibition’s title makes. But the selection on view is too small and too uneven to make an adequate case for anyone.
A visitor can almost feel in the air, though, the excitement with which the institution is looking forward to the time, still a few years away, when new quarters will give it the space to do justice to Mexican masters. In February, the museum board appointed a new president and CEO,Cayetana Gómez, who comes from Mexico City with extensive experience in museum development.
Earlier this week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to grant the Mexican Museum a 66-year lease, renewable for 33 years, on the patch of downtown city land it will occupy when it enters a new permanent facility in 2018, as the cultural facet of the ambitious 706 Mission Street residential development project being undertaken by Millennium Partners.
“Maestros” and the humble Fort Mason exhibition space it occupies give faint feeling for the vision and promise of exhibitions and collection display possible to the Mexican after its permanent facility has opened.
Some names among the “Maestros” will be familiar — Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, Jose Zuniga, Leonora Carrington, Jose Luis Cuevas — though the works that represent them may not be.
Graphic arts predominate, and in a couple of instances they surpass paintings here by the same artists, as in the case of Roberto Montenegro, whose untitled 1926 aquatint of two peasant women has a simple formal power far greater than his untitled 1942 oil painting.
A strong strain of surrealism runs through the survey, as it would through any overview of modern Mexican art. The entwining of ancient Mesoamerican, colonial and post-colonial Christian and other European cultural influences gave modern Mexican art multiple dialects of vivid pictorial expression.
A viewer might think passingly of Edvard Munch or late Picasso, as well as of modern Mexican influences, upon seeing Francisco Corzas’ fiery color lithograph “Artist’s Model” (1969).
Alejandro Colunga’s all-but-undecodeable untitled 1976 acrylic painting evokes a mulch of Mexican Catholic and statelessly irreverent imagery and impulses, both comic and sincere.
Cuevas’ dazzlingly complex lithograph “The Sorceress” (1969) bespeaks an inventive hand and imagination so driven as to leave detailed interpretation foundering.
The biggest surprise here may be Mathias Goeritz’s “Commentary on Psalm 117” (c. 1970): a gessoed wood panel entirely covered with gold leaf.
It gestures back in time to the lineage of gold-ground medieval and early Renaissance paintings and askance at similar works in a completely irreligious secular spirit by Yves Klein (1928-1962).
In case Psalm 117 doesn’t leap to mind, it reads, in the King James Version: “Praise the Lord, all ye nations: praise him, all ye people./ For his merciful kindness is great toward us: and the truth of the Lord endureth for ever. Praise ye the Lord.”
Goeritz’s piece can stand for the challenge that the Mexican Museum’s collection promises to offer to our viewing habits when we finally see it properly arrayed.
Yvette Gellis at Toomey Tourell: Too little contemporary painting delivers a sense of adventure either to informed or uninitiated viewers. Count the work of Los Angeles painter Yvette Gellis an exception.
Her paintings, in Toomey Tourell’s final exhibition at its Geary Street address, make a bracing impression. Their unpredictability is rooted in materials as well as style. One piece has a Plexiglas panel pegged to its surface, which serves both to activate all the work’s details in surprising fashion and as a symbol of Gellis’ rethinking of what she made.
Ruched gauze emerges from the surface of another small work, like a studio secret inadvertently divulged but then allowed to show.
The wonderful “Ruin in Pink” (2014) typifies in many ways the work Gellis shows here. At its lower left corner, cruciform bands on a white ground hint at a viewless window, seeming to invite light to stream throughout the picture. Dark-hued knife and brushstrokes spring forth suggesting stacked books or planks, giving way to a flurry of detail in the painting’s upper right quadrant — a nearly pure instance of how the painter’s hand can set a viewer’s eye dreaming.
The uneven success of Gellis’ work in this selection testifies to her willingness to strike out in any direction for the sake of her art’s liveliness.
fonte: @edisonmariotti #edisonmariotti http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Cultures-entwine-in-vivid-forms-in-Mexican-Museum-6132315.php
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