ANCESTRIES
(paintings and drawings)

Exhibit by JOSÉ APAZA

CHRISTIAN JEAN S.J. Gallery
UINVERSIDAD IBEROAMERICANA
León, Guanajuato, Mexico.

GALLERY RECEPTION
October 2, 7:00 P.M.
DURATION THROUGH
December 8, 2007

The spirituality of the field worker and the humble people of diverse settlements in our America, is the topic assumed by José Apaza in this new individual show in León. In it, he expresses his vision, in the manner of a snapshot, of what he has extracted from occasional ceremonies or rituals of ancestral origin, without a documentary intention, rather, primarily artistic.

The exhibit is comprised of watercolors, oils and drawings, some of great size, within a figurative style, in which the principal character is the human figure, basic element of his body of work.

 

There is a place I don't know in this world, no less, where we will never arrive.

– César Vallejo

Being before Apaza's work is to enter a space of uncertainty. Questions emerge, uneasiness takes over and certitude vanishes. A paradoxical effect from a figurative artist, from whom we expect that, in his work is reflected the anecdote and that he tell us the story. But far removed from Apaza's proposal, his work is not read through what is present but from what is missing. It's a work plagued by questions, incomplete sentences, that challenge and force the viewer to work emotively, to close the circles, to complete the path, to walk a route started by the artist, whose intention seems to be never to finish.

José Apaza is an artist who always has shown his commitment to the topic, where he explores his experiences and emotions before the daily happenings within the sphere of the forgotten ones, the segregated ones, those removed from us; delving in a state that we usually take for granted but removed from the feelings of sympathy in order to ponder the dignity and pride in the faces and attitudes of his subjects.

In this exhibit Apaza delves in the fields of the intangible, the ethereal, the spiritual; provoking in the viewer an identification of the private within that of the public and the universal within the indvidual, while recognizing in the ancestral rituals, the same quests, the same questions we always pose for ourselves when we arrive at the fork on the road. It's a great risk assumed by the artist in order to detach himself from a documentary effect and provoke readings that make objective, the transcendence from the great physical weight of the spiritual.

In these proposals which take us to the space of uncertainty and vulnerability, we find the contemporary attitude of the work of José Apaza, an artist with technical mastery and a handling of the figurative that could easily have been received by the academic canon, but which is conscious of its transient existence and abandons the easy dialogues and the satisfying offerings to ponder the unspoken in a world of unequivocal and convincing images.


David Ramírez Chávez
President, Administrative Council
Cultural Institute of León

 

INTERVIEW — CASAS + TERRENOS Magazine, November/December 2007 (PDF)