Vortex | Valerie Campos

April 18 - June 14
Philadelphia

Art opens a universe that is essentially unresolved and that, by extension, conveys to the artist a vortex of activity, sound and fury which may ultimately symbolize nothing. Like Varèse's conception of music, I think of painting as living matter - open rather than bounded.

As a self-taught artist, the old masters have been always a source of inspiration and the modernist impact has a strong influence on my work, such as music and literature. My work combines historical references from ancient art to modern art, Shunga erotic art, primitivism, photography, pre- Hispanic elements, and geometric shapes. The polysemy emerges through the incessant metamorphoses within the body as a continuous fusion and collapse of human history. The use of horizontal and vertical lines allows me to expose a grid that translates three-dimensional space into flattened compositions of pattern and color.

The sculptures and anthropomorphic figures that emerge roughly from some sort of pre-Hispanic bacchanalia are the result of various studies that suggest purging the image of any representative reference, but still extracting important visual rhythms and cultural features. In this way, I continually seek to transfigure contemporary observations.

Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called, noise.” I posed myself this question, "what is painting but organized noise?"

Vortex represents a process that possesses vorticity, a return to noise and treacherous visual rhythms. This process speaks to me of a struggle with the fundamental question of painting: the creation of images and what the simple act of painting can express - ultimately, a sense of loss but also a sense of deep learning - the rotation of self-knowledge with uncertainty always as its primal element.

Valerie Campos,

Abril 2024