Vanishing Points
Regina Aprijaskis’s paintings serve as a longitudinal study of abstraction and its distilled interaction of space and color realized over the artist’s extensive practice in Lima, Peru. In her latest works on display, such as Negro, rojo y blanco (1996) and Negro, amarillo, azul y blanco (2001), running colors and stripes, often in primaries, appear as vibrating planes, equally static and mobile, and balanced by black and white. At times, a wide stretch or band unexpectedly exposes the unprimed canvas to distribute light and to counter the apparently concrete adherence to structural principles. Discussing her union of color and line, Aprijaskis underscored the need for her paintings to shout and for color to hit hard or strike with an austere elimination and removal of excess.[1] Aprijaskis’s critical production of vertical and horizontal planes began in earnest around 1995 after a twenty-seven-year absence from the cultural milieu in Lima. This chronological lacuna and the urgent recuperation of her art in the narratives of Latin American abstraction broadly reflect the military dictatorships that shaped much of Peru’s political history in the twentieth century, including the 1968 coup led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, as well as the artist’s private responsibilities to her family and to her husband’s textile industry. Arguably, her paintings fashioned as red-and-white vertical bands—Peru’s national flag—inspire a further political reading based on the relationships between sign and symbol. Yet the steady trajectory of her career, which spans over sixty years, also suggests a prescient accumulation of spatial topographies measuring linear time, place, and memory, a collection of vanishing points and encounters recording her vast travels between Peru, the United States and Europe.
In 1968, Aprijaskis had her first-ever individual exhibition at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima (IAC), and displayed among her works a selection of abstractions from her formative series Paracas (1967). In his review, critic Juan Acha—widely regarded for his writings in the daily newspapers on the intersections of Peruvian identity and nationalism, and who later coined the important term on experimental art practices or non-object-based art called “no-objetualismo”—highlighted the importance of Aprijaskis’s stripping away of romanticism or subjective expressionism in favor of a dynamic structural surface and perceptual logic.[2] Acha draws attention to her successful arrival at abstraction from an early academic training at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Lima, then under the direction of José Sabogal, the renowned master of indigenismo. In the early 1940s, Aprijaskis produced examples of costumbrismo, folkloric studies of Andean Indian themes, still lifes or bodegones, and female nudes in the manner of her teachers Camilo Blas and Julia Codesido. Paracas (originally executed as watercolors on modest cardboard) captures in opulent colors and constructive lines the shifting coastal light, horizons, and atmosphere of this ancient seaside site; the following series Green Port and Espacio, larger acrylics on canvas (1967-1970), turn sharply to a volumetric expression of space, apparent in Untitled (1970). In 1964, four years prior to Aprijaskis's solo exhibition, the influential touring exhibition Josef Albers: Homage to the Square (organized by The Museum of Modern Art’s International Council) arrived in Lima at the IA. Through Albers’s use of color as visual memory, we may consider Aprijaskis’s attention to elemental form as one that oscillates between the physical and the psychological.
After the Second World War, the cultivation of modernist strategies in an industrializing Peru was collectively debated and declared by artists, writers, and architects, in such associations as Espacio (Space), which included painter Fernando de Szyszlo and architect Luis Miró Quesada Garland; the founding of Galería de Lima; and the later inauguration in 1958 of the I Salón de Arte Abstracto at the Museo de Arte de Lima. However, like many Latin American artists who traveled abroad in the 1950s and ‘60s, Aprijaskis was increasingly oriented to the New York scene, with successive visits to museum and gallery exhibitions. Between1965-68, she intermittently studied figure drawing and painting with the Abstract Expressionist painter Theodoros Stamos at the Art Students League, long a historical nexus in New York for artists from the US and Latin America. Under Stamos her drawings render the foreshortened female nude embedded in dense gestural brushwork. (For the series above, Greenport, Long Island, recalls the old fishing village and summer community to a coterie of artists associated with the New York School.) Accordingly, in her pictorial reconciliation of figuration and abstraction, Aprijaskis duly mediates the plane’s structural and corporeal relationships, unfolding space chromatically yet controlling surface tension through repetitive, framed edges.
Recognized as a counterpoint to Peru’s figurative tendencies in the 1960s and ‘70s, Aprijaskis’s paintings are frequently aligned to the label Hard-edge, or framed alongside the experimental Peruvian collectives Señal (1964) or Arte Nuevo (1965-66). However, her growing legacy offers an expansive interrogation of Peruvian modernism and Latin American identity, one that engages local and transnational encounters in constructivism, concretism, and informalism, as well as her individual position as a woman artist within the cultural politics of Lima.
Aliza Edelman, PhD
Regina Aprijaskis (Bordeaux, 1921- Lima, 2013) began her training in the arts under the tutelage of Camilo Blas at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Lima, Peru, where she learned techniques of realism and figuration and painted Andean scenes, nudes and still lifes. Her formative trips to New York City in the 1950s and 60s introduced her to abstract expressionist painting and allowed her to study with Theodoros Stamos at the Art Students League. Aprijaskis had her first solo exhibition at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo in Lima in 1968, which featured her first works of geometric abstraction. However, when the military dictatorship was instated that same year Aprijaskis stopped painting in order to work with her husband in a factory and would not return to painting for another 27 years. In 1995 Aprijaskis’ work was presented at the Sala Luis Miró Quesada Garland in the Centro Cultural in Miraflores, her first exhibition following her hiatus. She would continue making and exhibiting work until her death. Her work has been exhibited in individual and collective shows internationally and acquired by both public and private collections.
[1]Regina Aprijaskis, “Líneas de luz y color,” interview in Gestión (Perú), April 3, 1998, B-2.
[2]JA [Juan Acha], “Superando expectativas: R. Aprijaskis en el I.A.C.,” El Comercio (Lima, Perú), May 1, 1968; see also, N. Nahuaca [Juan Acha], “La peruanización de la pintura,” El Comercio (Lima, Perú), August 31, 1958.