Sólidos ingrávidos

Campeche is proud to present Sólidos ingrávidos, the second exhibition by Jou Morales (Oaxaca, 1990) in the gallery.

The starting point for the exhibition is the artist’s reflection on the global network of information and shared memory, understood as a framework of aesthetic references—from the first marks carved into stone, shells, and minerals to the creations of our time. By provoking aesthetic and material tensions that engage in dialogue with one another, the works of the Oaxacan artist revisit ancient systems, the graphic archaeologies of non-Western civilizations, and the mass production of contemporary imaginaries that extend into literature, film, and science fiction illustration.

The process begins with the reinterpretation of sculptures, murals, textiles, paintings, and codexes Morales finds in his path. This leads to a series of drawings that he later digitizes, distorts, and juxtaposes through collage, which he then prints, cuts, and redraws. He works with oil paint and marble dust—materials that, once dry, create a solid surface resembling stone: he seeks the sensation of matter momentarily suspended, of weight that seems to float. Each piece results from trial, error, and accident—gestures that allow unplanned textures and forms to surface and become part of the composition: scraping, layering, erasing.

The rough texture gives rise to a three-dimensional painting whose materiality evokes distant pasts or far-off futures. Amid stony blues and ochre dust clouds, titans animated by telluric forces rise in a motion that recalls collisions: each painting captures an instant within a sequence of movements whose momentum could mark the origin of our species—or foreshadow its imminent extinction.

While the landscapes of Jou Morales and the beings that inhabit them exist within temporalities beyond our control, this new body of work examines a narrative model that dominates both the creative discourse and the scientific thinking of our time: the (false) green utopia of the corporate universe and dominant nations—an idea rooted in ecological fantasies of sustainability, fictions that give rise to technological projects as megalomaniacal as they are outrageous. Fueled by apocalyptic narratives, some initiatives aim to terraform other planets or promise salvation from global collapse—an escape available only to the one percent. The artist conceives the mythologies of the end of time as a prologue to the creation of the machine, or the possibility of a different future. Yet he reminds us that once seized by power, human wit becomes a device for control and oppression.

The works on view are an ode to imagination as a form of resistance and a symbolic tool for preserving the unfolding of time. Sólidos ingrávidos reflects on the ways we narrate the world, and on how fiction remains the most vital and transformative material within our reach.