He was born in Perú, on a thursday perhaps, between the fog that embraced his tears and a desire to see the world. I know because his look brings the fog of great mountains, fog he has placed in the cities by observing people on their journeys.
On this journey he arrived in Mexico, perhaps drawn by Orozco, Rivera, Siqueriros and imagining Perú's history on a fresco a thousand meters square. But he found the true murals in people's journeys.
Without knowing his look, I knew his name, José Apaza, professor of drawing in a Casa de Cultura, simple, ironic, quick tempered, demanding, faithful critic of someone who appreciates life's dignity, the honesty, the yearning to be. Justice. It's been already twenty years.
In 1986 he showed in Museo del Pueblo. There, I knew his watercolor work and my being changed in purity and levity. Indigenous girls and women always in wait of no one and candles, levitating, interrupted in reality. The candle looks at the woman and the woman at the world. The candle is not for seeing beyond but for knowing how to contemplate the dark, the night, what is beyond the light, The woman and the girl themselves, God itself. It's been already fourteen years.
In fourteen years profound changes occur and it's possible to consolidate what's permanent. My eyes have changed and I don't feel the same as fourteen years ago. It was precisely when I spoke of purity, of levity, of interrupted reality. I remember Picasso who said, "To draw is to close the eyes and sing". Yes, to dare imagine is the heart of all will to be.
Now, these days, he exhibits Like Eternal Dice, as if the pictures were flung in time, in irreducible chance. Looking of images, Fog that clears Heaven and Earth and converts them into fog. Worn out bodies.
Apaza has Time as topic. It's never only Presence, because presence is mute and presence itself is an attribute of Destiny. Neither does he propose a Theory of the Body, because that would be a Theory of Form and all form is immersed in Time. Apaza is an artist on the path of time.
In his life and work, Time is the Eternal Return of an instant. Each line tends toward its own dissipation like an escape line and tends towards blending into a focal point, act, image and instant, can be seen as a vital pulse of light. That's how the Being, the picture, can be observed, in its transformation, being, becoming, and being able to flow into the infinite. Tenderness, love.
What view does he propose to the world? I don't know, it's a subjective appreciation. What's necessary is to give subjectivity meaning, to include it in Time.
Apaza seeks an image, a character who is the synthesis of an authentic life, he ventures over those footsteps and walks those same footsteps. All his characters are vanquished by Destiny, they confess without reserve life's severity. Desolation? Misery? Helplessness? Perhaps. However, the small triumph of each being is in persevering in life, they live, this is their hope. To endure being. Life as an act of faith.
These characters are time and Apaza intercepts them in that flow. The work lives parallel to those characters and if one of them dies the picture continues the desolation of his life's existence. Whence, the images are eternal returns of a single instant, parallel lives between artist and picture.
Apaza's images want to stop being but they reaffirm themselves in their permanence. They want to stop being art and remain in reality, in life. What reconciles those two moments is Time, the Eternal Return of an Instant.
demetrio vázquez apolinar