In watercolor, water covers color but discovering it, spreads it. Water takes on the form of the color that spreads it. Water carries color, and color, light. While light shows us forms, form alone shows us shadows. Between one and the other there is water in color, which is in light. There, the lightness of water is the measure of its form, the thinness, the texture.
Within the varied inventiveness the painter has to relate to those elements, Apaza seeks the other color of color, the restlessness of movement, what floats within the rooted. Water with its hands that seek form, color, its eyes that seek the limit, the boundaries. Light is projected becoming matter, creating images, riverbed through which intuition splits and adds soul to what is found.
In the ensemble RAZA, Apaza shows a world that looks at the world, its characters are not exhibited, they are beings who look at us from the paper. They watch people from their quiet integrity.
Apaza, peruvian watercolor artist, in contrast with his contemporaries, sees an opportunity of greatness in each composition. The gentleness of regional and indigenous life, is translated into an attitude of prayer and of facing its reality, its era. His characters' attitude is symbolic in that they are the ones who look at us. Hence, the quiet gentleness might be nothing less than the greatness of their race, the purity in relation to nature.
In DAWN, NIGHT OF CANDLES, COUPLE and STREET, women are shown clothed, always at rest, still, intact. Almost always beside a candle, waiting, walking but at the same time void of movement. Why the need to show them with candles and in a waiting pose? What's the wait? The flame lights the colors or brings out color? I think the candles represent the company of the world. Indigenous people light candles not to see, but to be in company so that in seeing them feel present. Hence the solace between two solitudes, Flame alone, I am alone, from Tzara. That's how dialogue is born between contemplations, the candle looks at the person, the person at the world. The candle is not for seeing beyond, rather for seeing what is not lit, what is beyond the candle, myself, the world.
In the work DAWN, a girl is seen as if she were a tree trunk, surrounded by candles. An intention to live two realities. A girl in perspective suggesting greatness through the magnitude of its trunk. Candles like trees and trees like candles. The tree —Vigenére might say— in similar way as the candle with its roots linked to the earth from which it draws its sustenance, the string does the same with the fat, wax or oil, that allow it to burn. The stem of the tree that sucks the juice or sap, is the same as the torch whose fire is maintained by the alcohol that draws itself and the white flames are branches dressed in leaves flowers and fruit towards what finally tends the tree. It's all reduced to the same white flame. In this comparison the tree is the girl who draws from the world, the sap and at the same time lights her presence in life. The more Apaza joins these realities, the closer he'll be to represent, not the attitude of a woman, but the transcendence of a race close to nature.
Certainly, art does not exist without the question of reality. And, what is reality for Apaza? I feels it's purity. Apaza knows that the quietness of the figurative is only a means in conforming to purity, added to a type of mysticism. Not staying in the attitude of quietness is what takes a whole genre, a whole race, toward temperance. Recalling the beginning, the characters look at us, in other words, they watch us from their temperance, not from a figurative attitude. That's an appearance. Therefore, reality in the background is purity. Thus, in OLD LADY WITH CANDLES, again the magnificence of perspective is shown. The candles and the old lady, two solitudes, or rather, two states, day and night. Duality in blending once again nature and hence the transparent effect.
WOMAN WITH BIRDS is not a woman walking but a plain symbol of people who have learned to walk and because of it, have become part of life. A walking that's repose.
STREET is a watercolor where a woman observes and waits. Who does she observe? The people outside, the world. Who or what does she wait for? She doesn't wait, her attitude is her being. She watches us from her transcendence itself, from within the lived purity and quietness.
Apaza's watercolors enter a field of purity, of composition that does not speak but wishes to live forever beyond the initial colors, the initial quietness. We must see, then, these watercolors as if they were colors and figures seen for the first time. Paint is a surprise in a measure found at the level of color, its texture and its composition.
Demetrio Vázquez Apolinar
León, Guanajuato. Semptember, 1988