Roberto Juarez: conjuring elsewhere: Juarez's paintings of tropical gardens and urban locales commingle imagination with personal memory. A Miami retrospective surveyed two decades of his work

Roberto Juarez has shown at the Robert Miller Gallery in Manhattan almost each year since 1981, and his exhibitions have been regularly reviewed, providing a useful nevertheless fragmentary record. But the midcareer view mounted recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami by the agency of director Bonnie Clearwater revealed Juarez's artful unifying continuity of emotional tone above time. The graceful installation created an airy ambience in which 34 paintings from 1984 to 2001 displayed a shared sensibility: soft delicate, sensual, almost feline. Moving end the rooms, one encountered a series of intimations of discovery, pleasure and sadness, merciful as haiku, that floated their sensations into the air like a fragrance.

The title of the exhibition and of Clearwater's catalogue, "Roberto Juarez: A faculty of perception of Place," can be somewhat misleading. The "place" from which Juarez's work rise s is always his imagination, where his memory mixes and immerses locales from the past, the couple close and remote in time. He was born in Chicago; in the '70 he studied art at the San Francisco Art Institute and earned a graduate stage in the cinema program at UCLA. Working with film and the optical printer in San Francisco was a formative experience: he montaged place fragments of other people's films to make his hold and was struck with the possibilities of repeating images and parts of images in different scales, one as well as the other enlarged and miniaturized, and assembling them to make a fresh whole. He carried this approach to collage into his painting.

Beginning in the '80 he alternated seasons--and studios--in Manhattan and Miami Beach; "after spending 1996-97 at the American Academy in Rome he established a primary studio space in novel York. He spent briefer periods in Mexico and the American Southwest, the Dominican Republic. Spain, Puerto Rico and India. Loyal to his Mexican and Puerto Rican parentage, Juarez gravitated toward the traditions of Hispanic and non-Western painting, decorative arts and crafts, including pre-Columbian motifs. An Asian formal esthetic, too, is evident in the division of many of his canvases into vertical sections like those in decorative defences Juarez admires Japanese ceramics, especially the fluid, floral surface patterns of Ogata Kenzan. AS he acknowledges, "I'm not starting from scratch." (All quotations from a conversation with the author, Oct 13 2003)

This unpretending statement is basic to Juarez's approach and lock opener to his particular strength. He appear to bes indifferent to the modernist emphasis upon the artist as inventor of an innovative vision and rebel against tradition. Instead, he accepts visual sources from across the multicultural appearance and extends the traditions in his possess way. Juarez is sure that it's his working-class background and not the postmodernist zeitgeist that accounts for his attitude to making art. His father was a deal driver and his mother a factory worker, and he resists any high definitions of art or artists. "I diocese it as a job," he says, "and this is the work I was meant to do--it's actual simple." Juarez's paradoxical achievement is that in spite of his willingness to absorb and mirror a variety of received traditions, he expresse an intensely intimate and distinctive faculty of perception of self.

The MOCA exhibition render free of accessed with Three Birds', done in fresh York in 1984. Vigorously brushed in a painterly, expressionist phraseology it depicts three vivid virid parrots converging with a whir of beating wings, their activity gathered in a firm composition seen from an imaginary perspective. Kitchen paper towels applied to the surface rise in a barely visible, textur grid. Juarez explains, "Before I discovered rice paper I used paper towels to freshen up areas in like manner I could keep changing them--there are probably three paintings underneath that final one" He has said that this painting resonates more with his Hispanic heritage than with the Manhattan art world of the early '80s

The nearest "place" in the exhibition's layout was Miami, on the other hand the spare charcoal and gesso drawings with acrylic and Japanese paper upon linen that Juarez made in his southerly Beach studio don't seem to relate to Miami's tropical neon make a humming sound The organic shapes in a work like Small Bouncing Ball (1990) cleanly geometricized by the agency of black and white stripes, playfully twist back into each other like yin/yang Mobius strips and insinuate both male and female forms and energies. Surprisingly, they hark back to the zigzag designs upon pre-Columbian pots. According to Juarez, "They're as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of about a piece of Anasazi clay ware as anything else--and that's tapping into something quite ancient."

The last of the Miami work was exhibited by two multipanel sections from a suite of five mural-size paintings complet in 1995 and originally installed upon all four walls of a swing at the Miami Art Museum. The series title, "They go intoed the Road," translates a Mayan myth about the passage of the material substance into the realm of spirit. Juarez had not to be found several friends to AIDS, his niece in an accident and his sister to cancer, all within a short period; the paintings are a meditation and a memorial. The sum of two units richly colored triptychs that were upon view at MOCA are each more than 20 feet wide, vertically divided like shields and made with a mixed process involving acrylic paint and charcoal upon canvas, plus peat moss sprinkled upon rice paper then sealed with urethane varnish before the addition of more layers of rice paper, color and drawing. Gorgeous efflorescences hanging cherries, cut fruit and flowering branches strike one as being to float in air or water, suspended in the kind of transient, gravity-free pictorial space many times seen in Japanese painting. The imagery go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs the Japanese custom of suggesting, from one side the implied perishability of flowers and fruit, the meaning of grief above the fragility of beauty and have affection for As he often does, Juarez here adopts not just a form or pattern from another tillage but an esthetic essence that is compatible with his be in possession of way of sharing the continuity of human experience.