We recently connected with Valerie Campos and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Valerie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

I think there is no safe or stable place anywhere. In some ways we are always taking risks and not deciding is perhaps the biggest risk of all.

Deciding to pursue an artistic career as a painter was definitely a big risk, but also a confirmation of what life means to me.

Painting is probably the only safe place I know.

As a visual artist and cultural promoter in Mexico, my vision has always been in favor of change. In Mexico and I think in general in the art world, there’s a big demand of a pictorial discourse for the artist, finding your voice, your identity, your style. For me, the risk has been precise the opposite, every time I have found a style, or felt in a kind of comfort zone, I immediately seek to lose myself again as part of a pictorial process that allows me to continue exploring. A process that does not end, that is simply a process. Not having everything figured it out gives you a tremendous opportunity for self discovery and a possibility of new ways of seeing things. During the last few years this process has taking me towards abstraction , and I think it makes perfect sense, since language itself is abstract. It’s interesting for me to observe the different stages of my process and it’s funny because I started out as an abstract painter and I had to go through a whole path of figuration to return to abstraction, which I believe is the ideal place to get lost.

Valerie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I work on painting, photography and drawing mainly.

The way I been learning art has been through self taught processes, by looking at other artists closely, but also by traveling and attending international art exhibitions and art residencies.

Besides my activity as an artist, I have also dedicated part of my time to promote Mexican artists in Mexico and in other parts of the world through programs that I direct and produce so this allows me to move and learn constantly.

I’m a founder of the program Vaiven Collectors, www.vaivencollectors.com a non profit association that produces short – format documentary series to disseminate, promote and open dialogues on contemporary art in México. This project has benefited a great number of Mexican artists and galleries by putting them in direct contact with important collectors.

We are opening a collective exhibition with two Mexican women artists — Perla Krauze and Maribel Portela through a program of Vaiven Collectors in collaboration with the WEXLER Gallery in NYC by the 16th of November this year.

At the moment I am working on a new series that includes 11 large paintings, and around 30 drawings and collages, photograps and installations that will be shown both, in M5 CONTEMPO gallery in Oaxaca by November 10th this year and in WEXLER GALLERY in Philadelphia by April 11th 2024.

Lately my paintings explores the liminal space between the conscious and unconscious worlds within a familiar yet cartoonish dimension. Space is flattened and stacked by depicting objects and symbols that represent different cultures of humanity at its most primal. At once, the characters driven solely by free association throwing fists of rage,and hedonism through s*x. In this universal cosmovisión actions are instinctual and have no regards for societal standards.

I work with universal symbols, that represents a synthesis of form and feeling. I explore the possibilities of radical imagination to create a collective archetype that could bring visceral renewed physical reaction to painting and its transformative power.

The way we perceived what we see and how we feel about it, interest me very much. This is very clear to me when I’m doing photography, for example. I believe that when we open ourselves to get involved with an art experience with all our senses , then there’s no need to understand anything.

I have always had a relationship with photography, even though I have never shown any on a proper exhibition. They come as a need to reconstruct fragments of memories, leftovers from personal essays, and glimpses of lust. It makes it difficult for me to distinguish between scenes taken direct from the world and those extracted from myself.

“ It is naive to think we can photograph anything from life, but I can see the world from this place where I feel so much, from where I struggle to keep grasp of my own existence and I guess I’m trying to reinforce
the two-dimensional surface of photography by rejecting illusionism in precomposed photographs.”

I think of art as a place where to find liberation, or simply start a conversation in silence. It is a way to connect to something unknown inside of us.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

NFTs promise potential—particularly for artists, especially if they’re deeply embedded in the crypto community, the main reason is artists are desperate to sell theirs works and want to connect with techie collectors and gain greater agency over the work, or simply want to develop new applications for blockchain technology. But as artists, we know that at the moment the NFT space is about collectibles and making characters for gaming and promotions. It’s not really for fine art yet.

The other side of this, is that the prevalence of scams and fraudulent activities in the NFT space contribute to a loss of interest among both, artists and potential collectors, leading to a significant drop in demand.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Second question

For you, what’s the most rewarding
aspect of being an artist or creative?

The creative act is pure intuition and cannot be translated into self-analysis. It is an act of freedom that represents the artist’s inability to fully express their intention; a conflict between what an artist wants to express and what they actually expresses is the “art coefficient” contained in the work. In other words, being aware of that near arithmetic relationship between the unexpressed yet intentional, and the unintentionally expressed. What emerges is a discovery for the artist themself: a witnessing of that powerful mediumistic manifestation an artist enters in the labyrinth of time and space, which does not obey any consciousness on the aesthetic level. These, for me, are the enormously gratifying aspects in being an artist.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.valeriecampos.com
• Instagram: valerie.campos
• Facebook: Valerie Campos Maldonado
• Youtube: Vaiven Collectors
• Other: www.vaivencollectors.com

Image Credits
By Valerie Campos