Charles Merewether “Signs of Life”

Alberto Montaño Mason has brought back to the representational ambition of contemporary Mexican painting the concept of a ground and field of signs. Paintings such as Bad Boy (1988) or San Alberto Mártir (1989) both suggest an occult language whose meaning is a process of slow release, delivered with the passing of time. In Bad Boy the dark forms rise out of a monochromatic ground like ancient monoliths, plinths that signify a language of form or language that is condensed into a form of abstraction. San Alberto Mártir on the other hand, is closer to Montaño’s sculptural work and suggestive of a world of totem figures and forms. A framed leg-shaped form hovers over a field of color to suggest an offering to gods or a spirit world. Like milagros, but here monumentalized, the image embodies an object of both sacrifice and offering. It conjures an image chanced upon in the far reaches of a desert, a sign of life that has become a relic. Framed and laid on a red field Montaño elevates and transforms into a fetish, an object that signifies the body of humanity and a sign of the indomitable power of the land, the desert.

Throughout Montaño’s work there are clear references to both ancient civilizations or tribal cultures and to Mexico. The first is most dramatically conveyed through his large bronze sculptural forms, hermetic and fetish-like in their oblique referentiality. As with Cíclopa (1989), these pieces are suspended against the wall, they appear as ancient gods, heraldic weapons and signs of power invoking the shell of a body, the claw and tooth of a mythic monster, the club and shield of a warrior.

Conversely, in his paintings, with their high-keyed color, lyricism and sensory pleasure of surface, there is a suggestion of a perceptual response to the Mexican land. To the North, Mexico becomes a vast desert tract, a land where human life and nature meet on common ground. The paintings radiate with a sense of the brilliant light the burning heat and the color of the desert. And in Balona (1988) or Testigos (1988) Montaño powerfully conveys this meeting through their heavy, ungiving, monochromatic surfaces as if to suggest a human life that has become an unwilling subject, a dot and trace in vast terrain of a foreign land.