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| Steve Alois Abulafia |
It may have been a chance meeting with Carlos Arana. The Juan Matus Café was always a fortuitous place for momentous coincidences. On the other hand, it could have been a camping trip near Kashamarka. Steve Alois Abulafia can be a bit slippery when he's talking about his work. Mysticism, shamanism, hallucination, prophecy, are all terms Abulafia freely and misleadingly uses in the course of his many interviews.
As a professor at Cueta College of Art and Design, he was known more for stubbornly insisting upon the primacy of the western canon. Kandinsky, not Castaneda, was his north star for metaphysical symbolism. Abulafia is a baffling mosh-pit of contradiction, and that might be where his primary strengths reside. He deliberately misdirects while his thankless champions repeatedly fail to pin him down.
“Isn’t beauty enough,” he rhetorically asked the visibly frustrated Bashira Indigo on CBC’s Arte Ahora. Being on television always brings out the worst in Abulafia.
He swore never again to use the color red, and for five years he kept his word. The paintings he produced during this period are universally considered his worst.
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