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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
Art in America, May, 2004 by Paula Harper
Roberto Juarez has shown at the Robert Miller Gallery in Manhattan almost every year since 1981, and his exhibitions have been regularly reviewed, providing a useful yet fragmentary record. But the midcareer survey mounted recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami by director Bonnie Clearwater revealed Juarez's subtle, unifying continuity of emotional tone over time. The graceful installation created an airy ambience in which 34 paintings from 1984 to 2001 displayed a shared sensibility: tender, delicate, sensual, almost feline. Moving through the rooms, one encountered a series of intimations of discovery, pleasure and sadness, gentle as haiku, that floated their sensations into the air like a fragrance.
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The title of the exhibition and of Clearwater's catalogue, "Roberto Juarez: A Sense of Place," can be somewhat misleading. The "place" from which Juarez's work emerges is always his imagination, where his memory mixes and merges locales from the past, both close and remote in time. He was born in Chicago; in the '70s he studied art at the San Francisco Art Institute and earned a graduate degree in the cinema program at UCLA. Working with film and the optical printer in San Francisco was a formative experience: he montaged found fragments of other people's films to make his own, and was struck with the possibilities of repeating images and parts of images in different scales, both enlarged and miniaturized, and assembling them to make a new whole. He carried this approach to collage into his painting.
Beginning in the '80s 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 New 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 screens. 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 modest statement is basic to Juarez's approach and key to his particular strength. He seems indifferent to the modernist emphasis on the artist as inventor of an innovative vision and rebel against tradition. Instead, he accepts visual sources from across the multicultural spectrum and extends the traditions in his own 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 truck driver and his mother a factory worker, and he resists any lofty definitions of art or artists. "I see it as a job," he says, "and this is the work I was meant to do--it's very simple." Juarez's paradoxical achievement is that in spite of his willingness to absorb and reflect a variety of received traditions, he expresses an intensely intimate and distinctive sense of self.
The MOCA exhibition opened with Three Birds', done in New York in 1984. Vigorously brushed in a painterly, expressionist style, it depicts three vivid green parrots converging with a whir of beating wings, their energy gathered in a firm composition seen from an imaginary perspective. Kitchen paper towels applied to the surface result in a barely visible, textured grid. Juarez explains, "Before I discovered rice paper I used paper towels to freshen up areas so 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 next "place" in the exhibition's layout was Miami, but the spare charcoal and gesso drawings with acrylic and Japanese paper on linen that Juarez made in his South Beach studio don't seem to relate to Miami's tropical neon buzz. The organic shapes in a work like Small Bouncing Ball (1990), cleanly geometricized by black and white stripes, playfully twist back into each other like yin/yang Mobius strips and suggest both male and female forms and energies. Surprisingly, they hark back to the zigzag designs on pre-Columbian pots. According to Juarez, "They're as much about a piece of Anasazi pottery as anything else--and that's tapping into something quite ancient."
The last of the Miami work was represented by two multipanel sections from a suite of five mural-size paintings completed in 1995 and originally installed on all four walls of a room at the Miami Art Museum. The series title, "They Entered the Road," translates a Mayan myth about the passage of the body into the realm of spirit. Juarez had lost 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 two richly colored triptychs that were on view at MOCA are each more than 20 feet wide, vertically divided like screens, and made with a complex process involving acrylic paint and charcoal on canvas, plus peat moss sprinkled on rice paper then sealed with urethane varnish before the addition of more layers of rice paper, color and drawing. Gorgeous blossoms, hanging cherries, cut fruit and flowering branches seem to float in air or water, suspended in the kind of transient, gravity-free pictorial space frequently seen in Japanese painting. The imagery follows the Japanese custom of suggesting, through the implied perishability of flowers and fruit, the meaning of grief over the fragility of beauty and love. As he often does, Juarez here adopts not just a form or pattern from another culture, but an esthetic essence that is compatible with his own way of sharing the continuity of human experience.
