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

He selects Western precedents, too: botanical drawings by

the Victorian illustrator Caroline May, and Martin Johnson Heade's giant close-ups of tropical flowers set against tiny, distant Andean landscapes that were far from Heade's home. Juarez seems to feel his way into the spirits of artists from other times and places by inhabiting their choices and following their processes.

Typically, Juarez spent part of his year in Rome working on a commission for Manhattan, a three-sided mural, A Field of Wild Flowers (1997), that surrounds the waiting area in the new Station Master's Office in Grand Central Terminal. Conceiving the area as a place of refreshment for travelers, Juarez marked the elongated view--presented at MOCA in the form of two maquettes--with vertical divisions as if seen through the windows of a train moving through a lush garden landscape.

His experiences of living in Rome produced Limitatio (1997), a painting that includes variations on the already fantastic shapes of mandrake roots, based on an illustration in a medieval manuscript at the Vatican Library. Partly as a result of his moving around a canvas laid on the floor as he painted, the downward-reaching roots and their upward-turning blossoms have no clear up or down, top or bottom, but seem to rotate in the mind.

Decisive changes occur in the latest series of works on view, which he began in the summer of 1999 in New York. Juarez's tendency toward gravity-free compositions has been amplified in the formal structure of these new works, which seem responsive to the urban experience around his studio, located on the 39th floor of a former garment district high-rise with a view of the Empire State Building, the McGraw Hill Building and the new construction in old Times Square. In contrast to the intimate close-ups of his previous works, these paintings take an Olympian overview, abstracting the city's feverish energy into large pulsing, spiraling patterns of rhythm and motion. Food Court (2000), for example, suggests a hectic floor plan that, he has indicated, maps the labyrinth of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, with its frenetic fast-food counters. The huge (21-foot-wide) and vividly colored Times Square Tiles (2000), with its abstract, whirling form, conveys an experience of liveliness and speed. Although he still uses the rectangles of rice paper, they function like the individual tiles in a ceramic wall mosaic, and signal an important change in his formal conception.

"Sense of Place" called attention to what painting can best accomplish. Juarez has summoned the medium's lengthy and worldwide traditions in his allusions to a broad range of styles, cultures and symbolic meanings. But in spite of his inclusion of past and "other" styles and his interest in repetition and ornament, his work cannot properly be called appropriation or pastiche, nor can it be deemed a revival of Pattern and Decoration; it is neither ironic code nor superficial visual reference. Instead, Juarez opens up connections to the cultural heritages and human experiences that formed these styles. He seems to have internalized a variety of esthetics, and, to the extent that empathy allows, their contexts. In suggesting physical pleasure, tenderness of spirit and awareness of death and loss, Juarez's paintings carry the residue of his creative process, which unfolds again in the viewer's own experience. He is unusually open to the imaginations of others, and this transparency may account for the intimate sense of identification that his work allows us.