Roberto Juarez has shown at the Robert Miller Gallery in Manhattan almost each year since 1981.

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 further fragmentary record. But the midcareer scrutinize mounted recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami through director Bonnie Clearwater revealed Juarez's crooked unifying continuity of emotional tone throughout time. The graceful installation created an airy ambience in which 34 paintings from 1984 to 2001 displayed a shared sensibility: infantile delicate, sensual, almost feline. Moving by means of the rooms, one encountered a series of intimations of discovery, pleasure and sadness, moderate 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 thinking principle of Place," can be somewhat misleading. The "place" from which Juarez's work come ups is always his imagination, where his memory mixes and be swallowed ups locales from the past, the two 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 standing in the cinema program at UCLA. Working with film and the optical printer in San Francisco was a formative experience: he montaged establish fragments of other people's films to make his have a title to and was struck with the possibilities of repeating images and parts of images in different scales, the couple enlarged and miniaturized, and assembling them to make a novel 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 of the present day 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 veils 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 becoming statement is basic to Juarez's approach and solution to his particular strength. He assumes 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 image and extends the traditions in his be in possession of 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 traffic driver and his mother a factory worker, and he resists any haughty 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 true simple." Juarez's paradoxical achievement is that in spite of his willingness to absorb and bring reproach a variety of received traditions, he expresse an intensely intimate and distinctive mind of self.

The MOCA exhibition expanded with Three Birds', done in just discovered York in 1984. Vigorously brushed in a painterly, expressionist pattern it depicts three vivid recent parrots converging with a whir of beating wings, their spirit gathered in a firm composition seen from an imaginary perspective. Kitchen paper towels applied to the surface follow in a barely visible, textur grid. Juarez explains, "Before I discovered rice paper I used paper towels to freshen up areas in such a 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 forward linen that Juarez made in his southern Beach studio don't seem to relate to Miami's tropical neon hum The organic shapes in a work like Small Bouncing Ball (1990) cleanly geometricized at black and white stripes, playfully twist back into each other like yin/yang Mobius strips and advise both male and female forms and energies. Surprisingly, they hark back to the zigzag designs onward pre-Columbian pots. According to Juarez, "They're as abundant about a piece of Anasazi earthen 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 onward all four walls of a stead at the Miami Art Museum. The series title, "They inscribeed the Road," translates a Mayan myth about the passage of the carcass into the realm of spirit. Juarez had thrown away 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 forward view at MOCA are each more than 20 feet wide, vertically divided like defences and made with a tangle process involving acrylic paint and charcoal forward canvas, plus peat moss sprinkled forward rice paper then sealed with urethane varnish before the addition of more layers of rice paper, color and drawing. Gorgeous flowers hanging cherries, cut fruit and flowering branches present the appearance to float in air or water, suspended in the kind of transient, gravity-free pictorial space as a common thing [i]or[/i] matter seen in Japanese painting. The imagery tread on the heels ofs the Japanese custom of suggesting, by the and of the implied perishability of flowers and fruit, the meaning of grief through the fragility of beauty and like As he often does, Juarez here adopts not just a form or pattern from another agriculture but an esthetic essence that is compatible with his acknowledge way of sharing the continuity of human experience.