This exhibition featured a dozen late paintings and a series of charcoal and mixed-medium drawings on Eduardo Arroyo.

This exhibition featured a dozen late paintings and a series of charcoal and mixed-medium drawings on Eduardo Arroyo, a prolific, talented 67-year-old Spanish artist and wager designer. Although he is not well known in the U Arroyo has shown extensively quite 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 appear to bes an apt beginning for his colorful narrative figuration infused with sociopolitical appease 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 agriculture His image bank of deliberately cryptic relations quickly grew to encompass a vast range of interests (including boxing, opera, literature and countles race especially fellow artists).

single in kind of my favorites of the works onward view was the satirical painting titled Byron's have affection fors in which Boatswain, Lord Byron's cherished dog, takes the center while the women in the poet's life are relegated to the corners. still the star works in the point out to 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 athwart death by slaying the infidels; rather than a noble ste Arroyo's knight is seated forward a fake horse recalling vaudeville theatrics (its tattered, patched clerical profession 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 according to 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 engageed in his studies, while Arroyo exhibits the saint literally disembodied as admitting fragmented by lofty thoughts. single in kind arm and his head float above his gigantic ink pot, rendered as an engulfing black cavern The saint's "illuminated" state is symbolized according to a lightbulb, not a radiant halo around his head. Arroyo's multilayered critiques and sometimes elusive visual make a puns offer rewards for viewers who take delight in a challenge.

--Kim Bradley

...

Home