Valerie Campos is a self-taught artist born in Mexico City (1983) and raised in Los Angeles, California, where her first visual influences were street art and Lowbrow, an underground pop surrealism movement indebted to comics and punk. Inspired by a wide range of musical genres, Valerie paints sonorous and organic spaces, combining abstract and figurative elements, that she fragments and reproduces in a kaleidoscope-like manner, which replicate the natural rhythms of life.

Campos' most recent works are part of her non-figurative repertoire, which rely on the game of chance as a starting point. The corpus and the plastic vocabulary of Valerie Campos are polysemic by nature, and dynamic in their themes that arise from the continuous metamorphosis of the eroticism of the body, and the fusion of symbols and spaces created from the concurrence of depth and surface. The forms and rhythms that emerge express evocations and memories of places always in movement. As a composer of symbolist adventures and topological deviations, Campos displays a surprising solvency in her drawing, a quality that elevates her to a higher level than others of her generation, especially considering her auto-didactical formation.

This current series revisits and constructs a dialogue with elements of previous series, such as Where Dreams Come True, 2011 (Museum of Oaxacan Painters); Cuentos Subterráneos del Eterno Retorno, 2016 (Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City); Evocaciones, Resonancias y Fantasías, 2021 (Vaiven Collectors, Mexico City); Monochromatic Series, 2023 (Wexler Gallery, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia); and Analogías 2023 (M5 Contempo Gallery, Oaxaca).

Since the beginning of her career, Valerie Campos has strived to reconcile representations from very different origins, to transversalize the contents and principles that determine individual, community and social behaviors. Thus, universal symbols cohabit the length and breadth of her work, sometimes being more evident, and at other times almost subliminal presences, which fuse elements from the high Mesoamerican cultures, in particular the hieroglyphics of the Mayan and Mixtec codices, along with caricatures and their capacity for synthetic communication. The mixture of elements strengthens an ironic display, which brings out humor through parody, demonstrating that it important to do things seriously, but not to be solemn.

Campos’ aesthetic deeply contemplates the materials and supports, canvases, papers and pigments with which she works, and demands a significant introspective process in the studio. Her gentle, but profound, intellectualism allows her to formulate her idea-notion-emblem of the body-consciousness. She astutely recognizes that the subject is not equivalent to the psyche from which it emerges (Freud), nor is the subject equivalent to the body from which it emerges (Foucault). Yet, the body can be a substitute for the psyche, and vice versa. Hence, the definition-identity of gender becomes a social construction, perhaps even an individual postulation.