Alfredo Arreguin

(Mexican-American born 1935) 

Pattern Painter

Born in Moreila, Michoacan, Mexico in 1935, Alfredo Arreguin has lived and worked in Seattle, Washington since 1956.  Arreguin’s intricate and brilliantly colored canvases are informed by the memories of Mexican culture and natural landscape as well as the environment and the animals of the Pacific Northwest. 

The hypnotic and meditative patterns found within his paintings are based upon pre-Aztec images, Mexican tiles, or purely geometric and optical patterns.

Alfredo Arreguin’s pictorial works inhabit an elusive zone that lies between the real and the marvelous, between dream and wakefulness.  All that is magic, the ungraspable, acquires, shape, form and color on his canvases.  Yet mystery never ceases; something always remains hidden there.

To fully understand his paintings, one must be willing to explore them with great diligence and infinite patience.  One must read, again and again, approaching it from various angles, the world of symbols that the artist has traced with a firm and masterful hand. 

Thematically and aesthetically, Arreguin’s art establishes a beautiful and harmonious bridge that connects human experience with the dreams and concerns of individuals from diverse cultures.

In Alfredo Arreguin’s paintings, ambiguity unfolds and remains as permanent mystery.  It looms as a force endowing his work with an allure that becomes an extraordinary power.  This power is what the artist, the magician, must use to help others, the rest of us, understand our place in the universe and grasp the true character of the relationship between humans and the organic world, between myth and reality.  The artist becomes the mediator between the real and the imagined.  He is the conjuror who, with his brush, can translate dreams into something concrete and natural, thus facilitating the mythological reconciliation of man and nature.

From Alfredo Arreguin: Patterns of Dreams and Nature

By Lauro Flores

Second Edition Published by the University of Washington Press  2007

Selected Collections

Artcoutrust/Paul Allen, Seattle

Boeing Corporation, Seattle

The Denver Art Museum

El Museo Michoacano, Morelia, Mexico

Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago

Microsoft Corporation, Seattle

National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC

National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico

National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Portland Art Museum

San Diego Museum of Art

The White House, Washington, DC