Gunther Gerzso is one of the most important Mexican artists of the post-World War II period. He was born in Mexico City in 1915 to European parents, and died there in 2000. Gerzso was one of the leading set designers in Mexico's film industry from the early 1940s to 1963. He began painting in the early 1940s. His first exhibition was held at Mexico City's prestigious Galería de Arte Mexicano in 1950 (Cenote was included in that show). Numerous retrospectives have been organized in Mexico and the US, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art will hold a major survey exhibition of Gerzso's work later this year. Cenote will be a featured painting in that show.

Cenote is one of Gerzso's most visually compelling paintings, and is a key landmark from early in his career. It is marked by a rich use of color (reminiscent of stained glass and the abstractions of Klee or Hundertwasser), by complex geometries, and by an extraordinary technical surface that involves layering and incising oil glazes. The work is also laden with cultural meaning. "Cenote" is the Maya word for a water-filled sinkhole in the limestone terrain of the Yucatán peninsula. The ancient Maya built cities near these natural wells, and made sacrifices of both precious materials and humans in them. (The Peabody Museum at Harvard houses thousands of objects dredged from the sacred cenote at Chichen Itzá in the early 20th century.) The roughly circular form of Cenote certainly alludes to these round walls.

Gerzso was close to European surrealists who took up residency in Mexico in the late 1930s and early 1940s, particularly Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Benjamin Peret. He learned painting techniques from Mexican artists Julio Castellanos and Carlos Orozco Romero. Visually, however, Gerzso's mature work is directly connected to none of these artists; while it has been compared to the equally hermetic world of late surrealist Yves Tanguy, critic Octavio Paz once wrote that "Gerzso is Gerzso, and nothing else."

Gerzso's work draws from three principal sources. From his understanding of analytical cubism, Gerzso created complex armatures and spatial relationships; this is clear in his use of "passage" in paintings like Cenote. From surrealism, Gerzso adopted automatist techniques (though his works are rigorously planned) and an interest in non-Western art and myth. Mexican critic Cuauhtémoc Medina argues that the latent violence (dark recesses, jagged edges, threatening depths) of 1940s paintings like Cenote is deeply informed by surrealist writers Georges Bataille and André Breton, who both idealized and demonized (because of the horrors of blood sacrifice) indigenous American cultures. In fact, Pre-Columbian art was also a crucial source for Gerzso. Through titles and imagery, he tied several major paintings to the ancient Maya and Aztec. Unlike Diego Rivera but like Joaquín Torres-García, Gerzso never "represented" those cultures; rather he used their sculpture and architecture as springboards for the creation of largely abstract compositions. More than any of his pictures, Cenote testifies fully to these three sources.