José Apaza's work in this show can be characterized thus: in these studies, sketches, paintings, the earth and the sky show us things and beings without qualifiers, naked of attributions covering their existence.

Apaza is an author who assumes a task which, within other fields like philosophy, has become important in being able to show us man and things free of detail and superfluous angles, that is, without attributes. To arrive at this point of view, our painter has subjected his work to a methodical doubt, to a deep rejection, and to every type of criticisms applied to the images which he absorbs and which are themselves resources.

Reticent, careful, he peels away the bark in order to show the essence. For this reason his protagonists (ladders, old people, rocks, hands, etc.) are presented to us without a function other than to intuit that it's a human body, like that rock, what is waiting, what is weariness, how is vitality manifested, how is light reflected on a country woman's lap, what mild whirlwind forms the dense cloud after the rain . . . . José Apaza designs only the PRESENCE, nothing more than the substance of things and the beings of the world limited by their body and their strict finality.

For this, so radical a program, that consists in clearing the eyesight in order to find the essence of each entity, the show's ensemble offers us a vernacular of separation and purity where the world camps comfortably: characters' backs, sidelong looks, lean athletes, scenes, static or slow, as if the air had been taken out of them and nothing moved . . . but all this cloister is in benefit, I insist, of the PRESENCE itself; and you might ask, the presence of what? if all is so devoid . . . of beauty. That is, after all, the theme within Apaza's work, not a landscape or picturesque windows, rather, the intrinsic order of aesthetic harmonies.

Clean, is the fruit he finally offers us, this wary artist. It's worthwhile to trust in the difficult visual asceticism through which this hermit has transformed the daily environment, colorful and vital, into a desert in which to experience the nakedness of the soul in relation to Things. José Apaza is not a painter who entertains us with his life's experiences (like others), nor with the spectacularity of his subject matter. Apaza is a man who sees and shows us after seeing the sky and the earth, the weight and mass of a child between them, the precise limit and consistency of the liberated bodies from servitude in action and deeds.

Even though José Apaza distrusts, surely, all light or enthusiastic mention that link his doings with beauty, allow me to say that the result of his creations, of his placing in parentheses all vain qualifiers and attributes of diverse entities, puts us within the possibility of living a powerful experience of an aesthetic opening to the world.

I think work, with the above mentioned characteristics, is one of the most appropriate homages to those who, twenty years ago in Tlatelolco, died to achieve justice. Like that, without attributes.


JUAN MANUEL VIVANCO CRUZ
León, Gto. Octubre, 1997

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