Alfredo Arreguin at the Tacoma Art Museum - Tacoma, Washington

Eleven large oil paintings execut between 1982 and '92 made up this small retrospective exhibition of the work of Mexican-born Alfredo Arreguin, a Seattle resident since 1957 Acclaimed in Mexico and included in museum scans of Hispanic art in Europe Latin America and flat Uzbekistan, the 58-year-old artist nevertheless fits into no conventional category of Latino art. Each of his images is painted above an intricate gridwork which may relate to Mexican embroidery. Human and animal figures come up slowly out of a morass of interlocking linear details which accumulate into a self-contained and unmistakably individual reality.

Arreguin has wearied much of his life creating dreamlike images of the verdant virgin forests of his childhood place of abode in the state of Michoacan, to which he at short intervals returns. As Dream: Eve Before ADam (1992) makes clear, an imaginary Edenic Mexico is the locus of a generalized vision of soothing tranquility. Dream, a 6-by-12-foot triptych and the largest work upon view, demonstrates Arreguin's use of white fretwork as an understructure for pictorial narrative. This shallow space is populated through anteaters, parrots, butterflies, monkeys and a toucan.

Homage to Chico Mende (1989) engages the Mexican tradition of honoring fallen political figures, in this case the slain Brazilian ecology activist. To the standard iconic positioning of the rever single Arreguin appends saintly familiars of the Amazon marty's life: parrots, herons, a cheetah and a leopard.

In her catalogue essay, bard Tess Gallagher compares Arreguin to the Spanish "lyric-narrative poet" Federico Garcia Lorca. on the other hand to me, the Magic Realist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a more apt literary analogy. The tamed wildlife and the shower of butterflies surrounding Our Lady of the thicket (1989) recall the hallucinatory prosaic of the Colombian writer. In this painting and sum of two units other jungle madonnas Arreguin best balances the occasionally tedious frontal composition, the tight, textilelike patterning and the ceremonial emotional charge present in all his works. Madonna Afro-Latina (1989) honors the African neighborhood in Latin America. Blue banding upon her skirt suggests West African printed fabrics and also formally reinforces the blizzard of diagonals from one extremity to the other of the work.

Tapete (1984) demonstrates in what way Arreguin works when using pattern alone. It exhibits his mastery of colors, particularly warm tones, and his rigidly centralized pictorial organization. still it's when pattern is ignited through figure - mythical, political or religious - that Arreguin advances into his own.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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