Javier Tapia was born in 1957 in Lima, Peru, and grew up in a period of upheaval when guerrilla warfare dominated political and social movements across the country. He moved to the United States in the 1980s, witnessing various phases of humanity: good and evil, intellectual and primitive, connected and separate. Tapia takes these studio themes as abstract shapes and broad strokes to serve as a metaphor for chaos and control, or structure and disorder. In the tradition of the Peruvian Textile, he overlaps, subtracts, and reworks the watercolors, flipping the paper out as bold colors emerge like carvings. The active ingredients emit physically; Work becomes energetic, on the verge of chaos, but organized in the constraints of paperwork. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia and works in the Virginia Commonwealth University's Faculty of Painting and Print Production, where he has been teaching since 1988.
