wordplay: Rachel Cole
“Just throw a stroke down and don't think. Because once it's down, it's down,” comments Jay Paul Apodaca, on the high-speed, intuitive approach he favors in painting. The homegrown artist should know, having created work and performed live painting for some of Denver's most roaring clubs, including now defunct Lotus and, most recently, Beta Nightclub. The commission for Beta particularly provided Apodaca the opportunity to ignite the spontaneity of his process to the extreme. In only five weeks, pushing paint across canvasses like Picasso brandishing a palette knife out of hell, he produced four large-scale works entitled, The Pangean Sea, Athena, Liela, and The Infirm. “At one point I was fantasizing that I had six arms,” he remembers. To complete a project like The Pangean Sea that consists of intricate formal composition spanning more than forty-feet, would take at least six arms, in addition to thirty-odd years of experience and the self-honed style that Apodaca can also claim to holster.
Preferring the liberated social concoction of writers, musicians, artists and generalist pleasure-seekers that exists in the club scene as a means of inspiration and exposure, Apodaca has defined himself by undefinability. After abandoning formal education (that included study with area celebrity artists like Dale Chisman), Apodaca chose to etch a place for himself in the underground bohemian culture amongst the clubbers, out-all-night zombies and gallery-alternative groups like Magnet Mafia. “I decided, at a stage, it suited me to dig deep and create a burrow and I just disappeared into my art. The stuff I was doing back then was like Basquiat meets Shilling,” he explains. Looking through his portfolio, it seems that he’s also Monet meets Ginsberg, pre-pseudo-British-Madonna meets postwar-Chagall, Thoreau meets Pollock, tormented-angsty-poet guy meets good-times-after-the-sun-goes-down guy. To rephrase: he is stylistically volatile, carrying the history of creative expression while defining (and as he notes, further demolishing) his own genre. “I'm my own student and master,” says Apodaca, “and if the student doesn't throw the brushstrokes down, then the master destroys it.”
The restless quality of his discipline that balances creation and destruction (according to Apodaca, even an avid follower of his sees only about thirty percent of his work out of thousands of pieces, the other seventy percent have been painted-over), in addition to an innate curiosity about beauty, is perhaps what makes him an innovative figure locally and beyond. His work epitomizes the fresh, environmentally conscious, post-Kerouac, urban essence of Denver while simultaneously appreciating universal human existence. Receptive, empowering sexuality paired with the electric, jittery movement of nightlife writhes in his paintings. It seems possible to crawl underneath the thick brushwork and layers of imagery on a single canvas and go to sleep hallucinating about geometric metropolises, radiantly fleshy figures, and metaphysical iconography.
But the man who has painted this town red (and green and yellow and various unnamable hues) nonetheless has a strong (albeit what a lot of the edgier crowd has been raising eyebrows about for awhile) critique of the city that bore him: “Denver has never had a clearly defined scene. Denver still needs to grow up and take risks.” In the mean time? The local young and creatively frustrated would be advised to keep one eye on the horizon like any decent avant-gardist and the other on Apodaca: this guy doesn't just know his ass from a number-2 sable, he’s inventing the aesthetics of Denver.
Want to get a little bit of Jay for yourself but can't afford the price-by-square inch of an original? He does T-shirts and prints by commission for a reasonable price as well as live painting performances.
June 6th @ 1822 S. Sheridan
JayPaulApodaca.com |