Tautology: Gerzso is Gerzso and nothing else. So wrote his friend Octavio Paz who with a great poet's concision characterized Gerzso's work with the epithet: "The icy spark." For more than three decades Gerzso has held the attention of those who recognize the singular consistency of his paradoxical approach. The smouldering colors, so brilliantly heightened, inexplicably give off a glacial emanation. In his ever unfolding vistas, in which there are inescapable hints of the majesty of the Mexican landscape, there is a light distilled, or rather, invented by the artist to lure the imagination beyond or behind the scenes into uncharted spaces. But (and there is always a but here) the artist resists the grandiose. Who wishes to know these paintings must know them in their details. Each surface is worked with minute transitions; each line is modelled to its finest nuance; each color is built for its maximum opacity, its most expressive density. The icy spark must sustain itself in the time it takes to build these sensitive surfaces, and the time it takes to scan them for their embodiment of all that has passed in Gerzso's mind and sensibility.

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.

• Visiting Gunther Gerzso
  Mary-Anne Martin
• Testimonials
• Interview with Gunther Gerzso
  Marie-Pierre Colle
• Gerzso as Sculptor
• Gunther Gerzso
  Dore Ashton
• Checklist
• Artist's Bio