It's surprising that an artist who's path traversed the Siqueiros Workshop in Cuernavaca, founded after the death of the communist painter, would resort to traditional academic resources. But in times of artistic opening when all resources of significance are valid, it's good that a teacher who has dedicated so much to child and youth education, opts to exercise traditional techniques in order to reach domains which a superficial vision might qualify as academic. I say superficial because strictly speaking, hostility toward academia has been a vanguard position overcome today, when instead, we proclaim the slogan of assigning worth all resources of significance. Towards the good of the communicative power of art, it has a use in José Apaza, to make understood with easily readable signs the elements of quotidian.

José Apaza proposes a theory of the body. His precise drawings do not idealize, but shows the daily work of sweepers, porters, and vendors. Without vanguard extravagance he makes charcoal, pastel and the difficult watercolor submit to imposed need to appreciate the dignity of unacknowledged trades in the bodies of their protagonists, who have nothing of the self-given classic beauty. The torsos of old beings their non-athletic backs, warn of a quotidian irreducible glory of aerobic artifice enjoyed by minds vilified by publicity.

Apaza does not settle in naturalist obviousness. His insinuations are subtle and conducive to pleasure founded in the symbolic compliment, that is, putting it in relation to things. Such is the case in the pastel, Don Andrés with his old body next to a fountain propped against a wall where it melts in the color gradation, excellently achieved. Something similar happens with the skinny arm of the exhausted and bent-over runner and in the process of struggle between disappearance in mid air or recover his robustness supported by his extremely skinny legs. At times, it's with light that Apaza achieves insinuate something, as in After the harvest, where light falls on the meager fruits retrieved with surprising treatment of white to contrast them with the shirt colors, covered by the blanket of brown tones and the hat which once again is lost in the dark to allow view of only a minimal part of the face. It's even possible to think that all this brings us back to the the importance of the poor harvest, before which the face and clothing don't count, other than the hands of the poor, with its evident veins and bones without make up.

Closer to realism according to the position of bodies on backgrounds devoid of local identity, Apaza arrives at the labored state like fine watercolor where part of a wagon with its corresponding graffiti, serves as backdrop to the bench on whose end waits a worker with his wretched baggage in a shoulder bag. This desolation explored by north american realism in the daily spaces, achieve in this work a significance that has to do with the field but also with its painful travel to the urban alienation suggested by the graffiti and the shoe-covered feet, his bright orange socks and new shoes.
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