Valerie Campos

In Desnudo transitorio, for instance, the feminine body that occupies the center of the composition easily arouses erotic thoughts due to its movements, which accentuate the voluptuosity of her legs and breast. However, the whole is characterized by a certain feeling of tranquility and peace, accentuated by the surprising presence of a dog, that manifests his joy by synchronizing his movements with those of the model, who appears to be dancing. By being represented in time, however, the dance has blurred the face of the dancer, which is probably the same woman in panties depicted in the drawing Dancing Series. Once again, the intimacy to which the painting invites the gazer becomes evident, as it shows a space in which security and warmth predominates, and in which the models, whether feminine or masculine open themselves with complete confidence, to the generous, beneficial, and even curative hospitality of the artist and hostess, who, sometimes, has simply offered a cup of coffee or tea instead of wine and liquors as it happens in Espejo de la transparencia, a title, which expresses quite well the cold distance that separates the scene from the gazer. Incidentally, in this last canvas, beside the naked woman that is resting calmly in the sofa, there is another dog, probably the painter’s pet, whose position echoes that of the many Olmec figurines that can be seen scattered in tables and shelves.

It is probably because this pet has a great proximity to the artist, that it has been portrayed individually in Momentum. Once again one recalls here Velazquez’s Meninas, or so many other of the paintings of the Spanish master, in which dogs are portrayed as if they were members of the Royal family. However, in Momentum the pet has been depicted recurring to the same superpositions of contours used in the human models of the series Resonancias, which places it in a universe fully contemporary to ours. Among the portraits of this series Mutatio is perhaps the one that can be compared more easily to Picabia’s Transparence. It is very likely that it is a self-portrait: the model indeed, has a clear resemblance with the artist. The difference with the other portraits is that, here, the artist isn’t simply offered to the contemplation, observation, and analysis of the gazer. Indeed, her look indicates that she is herself observing and analyzing the gazer, with the same intensity with which she invites us to contemplate her intimate space. Beyond the physical likeness, this is perhaps the reason that allows us to infer more easily that what we’re seeing is a self-portrait, even if the superpositions of various faces (three of them, more precisely), could lead us to think that the artist is suggesting a sort of fusion with another woman, perhaps just another aspect of herself. On this subject, there seems to be a clear relation between Mutatio and Alma Mater. In this last canvas, the painter seems to be putting the accent in the many moods of another woman (a model, a friend, a lover?) to whom the title suggests that she has a relation of a maternal type, although her nudity would seem to indicate, as in other paintings, the moment that follows an erotic relation. Here, the gaze that the portrayed woman directs towards the gazer is completely different than that of the woman of Mutatio. Indeed, far from being analytic and inquisitive, it is mainly sweet and introverted.

Beyond the ambiguity that may subsist in this series, a painting as Evocaciones japonesas from the series Evocaciones clearly shows that erotism is a constitutive part of Campos’ work. It should be said that this series belongs to a register that is completely different from that of the later Resonancias. The paintings that belong to this series are reinterpretations of great masterpieces that have been important for the artist. In Evocaciones japonesas, for instance, Campos superposes various scenes taken from the Japanese Shunga art, which erotic register is well known, although these scenes have here lost their explicit character, for the painter has depicted them blurring them. However, it is perhaps the only painting among those that where here included in which the erotic act is represented at the very moment when it is taking place, accordingly to the characteristics of this school of oriental painting. On the other hand, the superposition of various scenes taken from the totality of Shunga art, can’t be read as if it was a series of separate events. Instead, by the recourse of superposition, the canvas becomes in its totality a single erotic interchange in which caresses and moments of ecstasy follow one another. We are seeing a precedent of the series Resonancias, for Campos has here achieved to depict in one single plane, the temporal continuum that any erotic interchange supposes, whether before or after the act of love.

The fact that in Evocación barroca, the artist has inclined herself to reinterpret elements from Velazquez’s Meninas confirms, to a certain degree, the relation that was pointed out previously between this work and Resonancias. Strangely, the effect is here completely different form that which was achieved in this last series. Instead of affirming the sense of reality that predominates, whether in the Meninas or in Resonancias, the painter gives us a subjectivist view on Velázquez, in which other references to baroque painting also appear. On the other hand, the characters depicted seem to be immerged in a Dionysian environment, more fit with the Renaissance and the Mannerist period than to the Baroque, which somehow announces the wild ambient of the studio-flat now well-known to us. Similarly, it is surprising that her reinterpretation of the Vulcan’s forge, which title is Evocación Barroca II, the bodies so precisely depicted by Velázquez, are here blurred, and interpreted so subjectively that they lose much of the realism that defines them in the original, in an opposite tendency to what is observable in the series Resonancias. While, in this last series, Campos places us in front of the quidditas of things, by offering its essence to the analytical vision of the gazer, in Evocaciones, the artist seems to have internalized the works that she has reinterpreted through a process of abstraction opposite to any kind of realism, maybe to better assimilate the world of those artists to which she felt attracted. This process of abstraction is particularly evident in her reinterpretation of Picasso’s Guernica, in which the forms of the cubist masterpiece have lost all definition, acquiring, instead, an organic and violently colored aspect that gives to it a vaguely surrealist flavor, which contrasts completely with the extremely precise intention of the cubist work of art, just as much as with the “supra-conscient” realism of the series Resonancias.

It must be said that with the series Evocaciones, Valerie Campos inscribes herself in the tradition of artistic reappropriation which is generally related to the idea of postmodernism (to which such a prosaic subject chosen for a drawing as Bath series seems to be referring), but of which, in our country, Alberto Gironella has been an incontestable precursor. Whatever the obsessions that Campos may share with this painter, whether consciously or unconsciously, and despite the distance that separates them in formal terms, one may point out the affinity that they both have for great art and Velázquez in particular. If in her process of assimilation of the great masters we can see a tendency to interiorization and of assimilative dissolution, the fact that the series Evocaciones is prior to Resonancias, shows that her reappropriation has mutated in the best of manners. Indeed, in this last series, Campos reveals her own mastery as a painter by exposing us analytically to the reality of her intimacy. This only shows us that at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, -a time of confinement-, not only painting has not ceased to exist, but that, far from opposing itself to the contemporary world, it is fully able to restore our sense of the present. To recur, - by distorting it, of course-, to an old expression that yesterday critics used to consecrate painters whose importance had become irrefutable, we may say that Valerie Campos has found herself again, - and not only found herself-, as a painter.