Relaciones Públicas was founded in 2018 as a site-specific exhibition program and an agency for its fellow artists. It was born as a response to the curatorial necessities of the scene it belongs to and as an important catalyst in the creation of ambitious, experimental exhibitions, especially in the first years of the artists’ careers. RP is an entity that has built upon the agency of self-organization as a method for the accomplishment of independent, collaborative projects. RP depends on the support of sponsors for each one of its projects and continues to build a network of committed supporters. RP is an active participant in the changing needs of its generation, and it is known for its key curation of exhibitions.

Nations, Slavs and Tatars
Gathering, Shanghai
Regiones, Mariana Ledesma
Pies de plomo, Pilar Córdoba Longar
CONDO Mexico City
Pertinent Blackout
Lo más terrible, Josué González
Random Access Memories
Estación Material 1
Shy Cramps, Soft Guts
IUDUIUDUI, Kristin Reger
Garden of Delete, Luis Campos
¿Por dónde sale el sol?, José Eduardo Barajas


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Shy Cramps, Soft Guts
Luis Campos

Office of darkness or the beauty of writing for colleagues
My work in this text is by no means to explain Luis Campos or to frame his work academically, which in my case would be an outdated or fifth grade academy-style reading, as I do not hold any title that licenses me as such. I am supported by the fiction and theoretical straw of a community that has a special fondness for discursive justification. Nor do I pretend to understand his work or make it didactic for a general public, because this text talks about beliefs, specifically about faith, although I have not yet decided between: to have faith again? to believe again? or how to have faith? In addition to the previously proposed religious exercises, I would like to talk about what appeared to me around his work. I am not necessarily referring to invocations, but to an exercise in the free translation of certain spectra that underlie the darkness of the pieces arranged here. I like to think of Campos' work as an exercise in opacity, that I suspect, is voluntary. That is why I like to write for other artists, because we do not owe each other anything, but we silently assume that we have to believe in each other, although it seems that most of the time we only recognize ourselves among those we consider similar or desirable enough. to deserve a look.

When I walked into Luis's studio a few weeks ago, there were entrails scattered everywhere, nocturnal entrails, to be more specific. As if someone or something had entered that workshop with an open belly and only the entrails had been impregnated. And the body to which they were originally attached would have been hidden. In addition to the fact that I can see an evolution in the guts that have always inhabited his work, that is, the nocturnal entrails so characteristic of his graphic work, which are now exhibited in other formats. I can observe objects that function as a kind of musical instructional. In them, some self-taught artistic processes underlie, which, I suspect, come from an artistic education that is sustained more on YouTube than from any national art institution. These auditory tutorials are not explanatory, or at least not apparently, which confirms that the work set out here does not like to speak or justify itself, as if it were animated but not human. Democratic sculptures that connect the clay to speakers, cables that meet with booties and graphite armor, are just some elements of this installation where the large intestine never ends ... instead of an exhibition composed of separate or autonomous body organs .

Why is the title in English? I asked Campos the first time we spoke. He did not answer the question directly, but appealed to the epistemological musicality that translations provide. I have searched my notes because I am almost sure that I wrote down his exact answer, but that does not matter right now, because not finding it affirms the artist's obsession with restlessness. It seems that what their baroque images want to hide is their own animal desire to produce from the indeterminacy traversed by the artist's chronic insomnia. That also made me think of when I was left alone with one of her paintings, a giant painting that rested in Antonella's living room. He - I would dare to say that this painting is male - and I, we began to see each other, and that guy began to take out his pictorial organs in front of me, that painting was a witness and he knew it. Campos's pieces peek behind the scenes, while listening to some detective clues in the music audios and sculpture-tutorials that will help his paintings to be vulnerable. Another kind of exposed entrails.

You are seeing and you do not see, then. That is what I feel when I see the work here arranged. Or that the pieces are going around me or that there are always hidden images that will be revealed at will. An exhibition that spares its own secrets. Smart thing in a country that gets more explicit by the second. So there I begin to believe. My faith appears before what I intuit, but I cannot see.

Let the search for purity in art die.

Yours truly,

Paloma Contreras Lomas

September 2021

Sept. 09 - Oct. 09, 2021