Raphael Collazo: The Excitement of Paint
The paintings of Raphael Collazo are dazzling visual abstractions often energized by biomorphic and figurative references. In spire of a short life, he left a legacy of beautiful, exuberant paintings that reveal a vitality of intent and vision, a love of color, and, as he once declared, “the excitement of paint.” Working with such diverse materials as wallpaper, oil paint, sandpaper, tar, and wood, Collazo found inspiration in such locales as New York, Vermont, and Rome. Rooted in the physicality of Abstract Expressionism, he was drawn to the visceral qualities of Action Painting. His strategic use of color also reveals a keen understanding of how to control space and stimulate an emotional tenor through paint.
Collazo was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1946, and raised in New York City by his mother and grandmother. He attended Pratt Children's School and the School of Visual Arts, both in New York. Later, in 1967, he attended the Art Student’s League, where he studied with Morris Kantor and Frank Mason. As a young artist, Collazo was an adroit draftsman and filled notebooks with sketches of lush vegetation, stylish women, exotic places, angels, birds, marine life, and images from mythology. In the mid-1970s, he developed his Prophecies series which were marked by scraffito inflections and the influences of Abstract Expressionism, the Italian masters, and the eighteenth century French painters.
In the early to mid-1980s, Collazo created a flowery, stylized motif for the Early Tapestries series, so named for their layered tapestry-like effects of maze and grid patterns. This series was followed by the Middle Tapestries, large collaged works with historical and philosophical themes, and the Late Tapestries series, which reference dense swamps and forest landscapes. In the mid-to late 1980s Collazo embarked on a new series, Nymphal Instars, inspired by the metamorphosis of insects as a metaphor for the creation of life and spiritual awakening. When he took an artist residency at the noted Vermont Studio Colony in Johnson, Vermont, in 1987, his work shifted to address the forces of nature, as seen in the series Early Healing Gardens. Two years later Collazo attended the acclaimed Yaddo residency program in Saratoga Springs in New York, which resulted in the Transcendent series of thick, impastoed paintings and the inclusion of a solitary black figure. These were to be his last works.
Shortly after his return to New York City from Yaddo in 1989, Collazo fell ill and died of AIDS several months later in 1990. His work was memorialized in an exhibition that year at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art in New York, followed by an exhibition in 1992 at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. In 1994, his longtime partner and patron, Ernest Acker-Guerardino, organized another retrospective of Collazo’s paintings at the Museo de Arte e Historia de San Juan, followed by an exhibition at the State University of New York’s Museum of Art in Albany. His paintings are now in several collections, including El Museo del Barrio; the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico; the Museo de Arte de Ponce; the Museo Historia, Antropologia y Arte of the University of Puerto Rico; the University of Arizona Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Tampa Art Museum in Florida; and the Tucson Museum of Art.
