Born in Mexico in 1935 and a resident of Washington State for nearly five decades, Alfredo Arreguin has long been recognized as a major force in pattern painting. His canvases are tapestries that mingle diverse and interpenetrating influences and images: the traditional crafts of his native Michoacan; the lush rainforests of his homeland and of the Pacific Northwest; Japanese ukiyo-e prints; sacred and endangered animals; gods and and totemic figures; icons like Frida Kahlo and Cesar Chavez; and motifs including masks, eyes, and abstractly patterned tiles.

But Arreguin's paintings, for all the apparent flatness of their surfaces, conceal an astonishing depth of perspective. The basis of their composition is a grid of colorful patterns applied to superimposed planes, and below the surface of each completed painting are many others, transformed by the artist's strategic occlusions and erasures. The result is an exuberant, phosphorescent visual interplay in which images combine to form other images, yielding a potent narrative power and pointing up the profound, ambiguous symbiosis between human beings and nature, fiction and reality, and the natural and supernatural worlds.

Lauro Flores reveals Alfredo Arreguin as "a genuinely American painter, in the real, hemispheric sense of this term" - an artist of magic, mystery, and revelation whose place in the history of North American art has already been secured.

Twenty-three new paintings are included in the second edition of this highly regarded book first published in 2002.

Arreguins palpitations of color and light and arrested movement awaken our sublimated vision. His paintings seem to force our entire being to experience its livingness as an insatiable yearning and questing of the eyes. -- Tess Gallagher, from the Foreword

About the Author

Lauro Flores is chair and professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington. His anthology The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-five Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature received an American Book Award.

Reviews

"Secondhand copies of the first edition can go for up to $500, making this a bargain."

* Seattle Times *

"Among the more unique and innovative contemporary artists of [the Pacific Northwest] is Alfredo Arreguin. Born in 1935 in Michoacan, Mexico, he has spent almost a half century of his life in Washington state. His paintings reflect both experiences and are characterized by distinctive and pervasive patterned backgrounds, elaborate details and images in the patterns, intense colors and figures, objects, and themes that are reflective of the Northwest and Mexico. . . . The text in this handsome volume is in both English and Spanish with numerous beautiful reproductions of his paintings that bear witness to Arreguin's distinctive talent."

* Choice *



Book Information
ISBN 9780295987347
Author Lauro Flores
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint University of Washington Press
Publisher University of Washington Press
Weight(grams) 1225g