Immigrants in the land of imagination.

• Author: Bianco, Adriana
• Position: Paintings by Argentinian Jose Alberto Marchi

Jose Alberto Marchi's subjects - nineteenth-century workers and immigrants - inhabit fantastic forests, lofty haystacks, surreal buildings, and travel on roads to nowhere. They draw the viewer into a world of dreams, ambiguity, and symbolism.

Marchi is part of a strong trend toward figurative painting in Latin America, expressed in a range of styles - from the Mexican muralists to the Haitian primitives and from the hyperrealistic approaches of Chilean artist Claudio Bravo to the familiar deformations of the Colombians Fernando Botero and Enrique Grau. To some extent, such figurative expressions grew out of a Latin American idiosyncrasy that inclines more to sensation than abstraction, to sensuality than to intellectualization, and to magical realism than to structural discipline. Among these figurative artists, Marchi stands out because of his disquieting visions of immigrants and workers copied from turn-of-the-century photographs.

Born in Argentina in 1956, Marchi has not yet had time to develop a full career. His first artistic efforts were at the age of sixteen, inspired by his idols, Rafael, Ingres, and Holbein. He studied fine arts in Buenos Aires and at twenty-four decided to exhibit his classical drawings, but he encountered heavy criticism from the vanguard artists who dominated Argentine art at that time. Such criticism caused him to withdraw from the art world for almost ten years, to an advertising office, where he developed rapid solutions to commercial artistic problems, and, to some degree, to financial ones as well. Yet he felt dissatisfied as an artist and could finally no longer deny his vocation. He decided to leave everything else behind and devote himself exclusively to painting and drawing.

Marchi was awarded First Drawing Prize (1986) by the Salon Nacional de Dibujo y Grabado (National Salon of Drawing and Engraving) and recently received the M-AAA/USIA (Mid-America Arts Alliance/United States Information Agency) Fellowship, enabling him to study in the United States at Queens College, in New York. There, among a community of painters and professors, the perfection of his drawing technique and the evocative nature of his images attracted considerable attention. "It seemed to them," says Marchi, "that my painting was very European, not a part of the Latin American canons."

Marchi's Buenos Aires workshop is located in a sprawling, old house typical of the port quarter. Surrounded by books and records, the studio...