@ARTSBYTADEO

Javier Tadeo Contreras · Dallas, Texas

Javier Tadeo Contreras is a Panama-born artist working out of Dallas, Texas.

Known by his street name Panama, he works with plexiglass to create art that reflects real stories and motifs drawn from his own life experience.

His work explores suffering, hope, and the raw emotion of life.

This is the story.

〔 Panama 〕

Born in Panama, one of nine. While his mother worked in the States he was raised by Miss Lloyd, a Jamaican woman close to ninety who ran a rooming house and took him to church twice a week. At three he was playing piano and reciting scripture. She told him everything she had would one day be his. Years later he went back. The land was cleared.

〔 Texas · 1974 〕

Wichita Falls. Spanish at home, English everywhere else. Working by six: paper routes, golf balls fished from ponds and sold for a dime, bottles for three cents. He blew air into his lunch bag at school so nobody could see how little was in it. By his junior year he was homeless: everything he owned in one bag, showers through first-period athletics, heat off an extension cord run to the house next door.

〔 The Rise 〕

By his twenties it was lined up. The act he managed signed to the same label as Vanilla Ice. Modeling work in Dallas. Everything, in his words, was getting ready to blow. The street called him Panama.

〔 The Fall 〕

Then a federal indictment: a $248 million drug importation case run behind his back by a man he trusted. The government offered immunity if he testified. He refused; to him the deal was a confession, and he had nothing to confess. A courtroom with nobody who looked like him gave him twelve years.

He served six and a half, most of it in the prison law library fighting his own conviction. He won. By then the time was served.

He calls prison the greatest thing that ever happened to him. It stripped him to the bare bone. What was left is what he paints.

〔 The Work 〕

He paints on the back of plexiglass, in reverse. The first mark ends up nearest the viewer; the background goes on last and seals everything. Nothing can be corrected. Almost everything he paints is a face. Each piece leaves the studio with its story written down: work meant to illuminate God, and to hand you back your own face.

“I know without a shadow of doubt that the world is nothing but art.”

When someone stands in front of a piece and recognises their own life in it, the work is finished.