NEREIDA APAZA
THE LIGHT OF DARKNESS

Symbolic, narratively poetic, metaphoric and melancholic, nostalgic and controversial, interrogatory and assertive, instrumentalized by way of childhood expressions and yet mature and hurting as that of an adult experience, The Light of Darkness brings together a series of visual work and poetic expression which Nereida Apaza offers as living testimony of these times of uncertainty, of dreams, doubts and sadness, while resisting the urge of succumbing her sensibility in spite of distress, and finding a possible meaning and a semihidden hope through the persistence of image and the fragility of words.

The exhibit consists of an open series of works constructed through a visual axis –seed, egg, tree, flower– each of which carries a silent symbolic charge that is easily felt. The origin, housed within the egg and the seed; the permanence within the tree trunk which shows the stretch marks of time and the stubborn resistance for survival; the flower which proclaims life and anticipates the continuity of the cycle.

The material choice of embroidery, clumsy and strained, avoiding to imitate the confidence of the line of a pen, perhaps in order to underline the gesture of the dedicated artisanry, provides these works with a particular personality, private and unique. Images complemented by brief poems, are circumscribed in limited spaces.

In opposition to the proclamation of impotence, pain and anxiety, there is that desire for light, so explicit in the small boat that sails through the line of the allegorical egg or the birds that show freedom in their open flight.

Special mention is deserved to the serie “The cause, the root”, where the artist resorts to designs similar to those of urban maps, where a sort of randomly compiled and disarticulated skeletons, hide within them such blunt inscriptions as “they are poor” or “he is illiterate” showing the segregation and the marginalization of a fractured society.

Merit of an accomplished proposal where the artist filters and carries not just her personal experience but that of shared sentiments, in an absence of rhetoric or forced discourse. Just offering her task, that of a sincere artist.

Élida Román August 2020