The Mexico City–based gallery Campeche presents a group exhibition organized by Abraham Cruzvillegas around affective bonds
- MARIA OLIVERA
“Please read this tangle as a quipu, in such a way that it provokes a solferino and emerald epiphany, like the moles on someone’s lower back—face down on the grass in Panhandle Park, or in Barra de Potosí, or in Chacahua, or in San Agustinillo, or in Chacalilla, or in the sadly famous Parque de la Bombilla—embraced by the loved one(s) and by the Fresh air in the summer of love.” With these words, Abraham Cruzvillegas closes the wall text of an exhibition that emerged under the pretext of continuing a conversation the artist—organizer, teacher, and friend—has sustained with various agents since 1987, and which continues to this day.
Fresh Air in the Summer of Love, an exhibition on view at Campeche gallery in the Roma Sur neighborhood (Mexico City) through October 21, arises from Cruzvillegas’s initiative with the idea of celebrating and sharing, of formulating a kind of manifesto with the participants in the show, as well as with the gallerists and the public who join this conversation. “It was a project I proposed to Fátima González because I was very happy that she decided to venture into something as complicated as running an art gallery,” he shares. The exhibition project itself is a confirmation of the friendship that binds everyone involved, at different levels of closeness but always horizontally.
The show brings together the work of twenty-three artists from Mexico and abroad, from different generations who share in common a conversation with Abraham Cruzvillegas. The exhibition includes works in formats such as collage, painting, sculpture, and installation; most of the pieces are recent productions, created between 2019 and 2023, although there is a leap into the past with a 1987 photograph by Andrés Garay. At first glance, the thread connecting the works in dialogue is not immediately evident; to grasp it, one must approach the history of each artist. When speaking about each piece, Cruzvillegas identifies not only the formal or poetic characteristics of the works but also the affections, bonds, and shared interests involved. He met some participants in classrooms; others, like Guillermo Santamarina, he has known for many years.
Walking through the exhibition alongside the organizer, we enter a world that expands and becomes enriched. In addition to presenting La persistencia de Caín, six photographs intervened with gouache, Obed Calixto also has a son and huapango huasteco trio called Los Descarados. Rita Ponce de León exhibits three ink drawings on paper in a 4 x 4 cm format titled Estamos juntas, estamos vivas (2020), La única oportunidad (2023), and Secreto (2023); moreover, Cruzvillegas tells us, she is an excellent capoeira dancer. Gustavo Rodríguez Valtierra is a visual artist and also repairs vehicles, hence his piece Debajo del auto (2023), created with a worn-out shop rag that brings together the history of painting and that of traffic accidents… The emotive descriptions of each work illuminate the closeness the artist maintains with each of his colleagues, making this exhibition a chaotic and unstable conversation, yet also plural and refreshing.
The underlying reflection is a collective question: what does friendship mean? How can we weave our affections within a violent, consumerist reality that easily discards human relationships? Abraham Cruzvillegas acknowledges the need to experience companionship and, although the desire to be together intensified after the pandemic, this interest originates in the testimonies of a society fractured for many years. What is being fostered here is thus an invitation to return to one-to-one relationships. As a whole, the exhibition seeks possibilities in healing, in rebuilding desire: “As the Situationists used to say: how can we coexist, desire one another, be together respectfully and lovingly, without destroying?”
Cruzvillegas insists on not calling himself a curator, partly out of respect for that role, partly because what he seeks are pretexts and spaces to confabulate, conspire, and convene. The act of organizing group exhibitions stems from the need to be with people he cares about: “For me, this is a manifesto of friendship that takes the form of an exhibition.” It is also a way to speak about emerging art, understood not only as the work of young people (and not so young in some cases), nor as discoveries of the art of the future, but simply as artists who, through diverse practices, are setting the terms for new questions in the twenty-first century.
The title of the exhibition echoes another show with the same name thirty years ago; it was curated by Guillermo Santamarina, and Abraham Cruzvillegas participated as an artist. “I like creating this hinge in time where now he [Santamarina] participates as an artist and explicitly manifests what we are talking about—friendship. The fresh air is these people, who for me represent the future, and the summer of love is the story of my life.”
Participating in Fresh Air in the Summer of Love are Abraham González Pacheco, Abraham Julián Togar, Alejandra Avilés, Andrés Garay, Ángel Marcano, Anousha Mohtashami, Ayako Sakuragi, Bayo Álvaro, Eun Sol Lee, Gabriel Moraes Aquino, Guillermo Santamarina, Javier Carro, Gustavo Rodríguez Valtierra, Jazael Olguín Zapata, Marcela Calderón Bony, Milana Gabriel, Mónica Herrera, Salvador Xharicata, Obed Calixto, Rita Ponce de León, Sofía Bonilla Otoya, Sarah Konté, and Wayzatta Fernández.
