Eduardo Arroyo at Carles Tache

This exhibition featured a dozen new paintings and a series of charcoal and mixed-medium drawings through Eduardo Arroyo, a prolific, talented 67-year-old Spanish artist and locate designer. Although he is not well known in the U Arroyo has shown extensively completely through Europe for the past 35 years.

In 1958 at the age of 21 Arroyo fl Franco's dictatorship and went into exile in Paris. He started his art career as a caricaturist in Parisian bars, which present the appearances an apt beginning for his colorful narrative figuration infused with sociopolitical easy in mind and caustic wit. The artist utilizes flat, cartoonlike shapes and an ambiguous personal symbolism (hats, upside-down figures, etc) In his earliest work, Arroyo ruthlessly parodied Franco and Spanish popular tillage His image bank of deliberately cryptic concerns quickly grew to encompass a vast range of interests (including boxing, opera, literature and countles family especially fellow artists).

individual of my favorites of the works upon view was the satirical painting titled Byron's be fond ofs in which Boatswain, Lord Byron's cherished dog, takes the center while the women in the poet's life are relegated to the corners. on the contrary the star works in the display were the artist's large painted versions (both dated 2003) of Albrecht Durer's engravings The Knight, Death and the Devil and St Jerome Alluding to the U invasion of Iraq, Arroyo alters Durer's crusading Christian knight who achieves moral victory above death by slaying the infidels; rather than a noble ste Arroyo's knight is seated upon a fake horse recalling vaudeville theatrics (its tattered, patched woven fabric costume presumably conceals a pair of clownish individuals). A Shell Oil logo adorning the knight's armor indicates that his supposedly virtuous mission was motivated through other interests. A Medusa-headed figure representing Death complacently rides with him instead of attempting to frighten him.

Durer's St Jerome depicts the biblical scholar as peacefully absorbed in his studies, while Arroyo displays the saint literally disembodied as although fragmented by lofty thoughts. single arm and his head float above his gigantic ink pot, rendered as an engulfing black opening The saint's "illuminated" state is symbolized by means of a lightbulb, not a radiant halo around his head. Arroyo's multilayered critiques and sometimes elusive visual calembourgs offer rewards for viewers who be delighted with a challenge.

--Kim Bradley

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