For unknown reasons (actually, I do know but it's best to not write them down anymore), these watercolors of José Apaza cause in me an overcast of nostalgia long thought left behind. The stubborn and raw reality of his drawings push me under the folds of a memory open to sunsets always present and alive, overwhelmed by distance and remoteness.
These drawings, these watercolors, have defeated me. I see myself (forgive my sadness) in the middle of a town square in some Andean village of my country. That country with the name of an imaginary line - Ecuador, while at the same time images are evoked of a Peruvian town in Perú - as Vallejo might say. And yet, the hands, the faces of these IndIviduals, the color of their clothing and that pain of centuries engraved in their eyes, do not merely copy the everyday existence of South American indians. They echo visions of our fraternal Mexican land, where solidarity has the deliciousness of a glass of water in the noon sun. They are Chamula Indians. That says it all. What remains comes from the efficacy of his paintbrush, free of pseudo-vanguard pedantries that almost always are illusory ways to flee into the void, when sophistication and extravagance are their only visible weapons.
No, José does not fall prey to whims of painting fads. Neither is he a traditionalist, he is not of those who dream of past ages nor believe in the sophisms about “the good old days”. For Apaza this is his time and it’s the best time for his exIstence, for the testimony of his (our) era that may be (as Ernesto Cardenal said) barbaric and belligerent, but profoundly poetic.
If I can speak (rather, write) of anything, it is of poetry, I believe. That’s why these watercolors take me back to that great poignant and universal poet, compatriot of José’s, Cesar Vallejo. The Andean breath these verses carry, always human, echo in Apaza’s ochres and blues, they are like transpositions of aged highland poems, turned efficient brushstrokes, nourishing feelings and passion. I’m not to blame. The only connections his works dictate to me are of the poetic order. It’s possible that the technical experts might find similarities, influences and other detours belonging to the embellishing puritanism. To me it suggests verse upon verse of breath, faltering with the “ardor” of the bleak wilderness, with the biting cold that forces us to curl our body into the original posture of nearness to life. Above all, Apaza’s paintings tell me about women and men that journey in their dailiness as if with a load on their shoulders, with the integrity and decisiveness of those who have inherited in life the balance of doctored centuries of exploitation. Indeed, of colonialism. In other words I receive a breath of humanity. Most importantly, his paintings become inherently human; and it is In this overflowing humanity of Apaza that I find the greatest worth of hIs watercolors, because at this point in the century, to continue being human Is beyond the expected. And that’s enough for me.
Fernando Nieto Cadena