GALERÍA DE ARTE
QUERÉTARO
"A DECADE OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN QUERÉTARO"
CRITERIO
"Perhaps the mad are the truly sane"
In the Albedo Series, Raúl Campos paints madness in order to look again at what we call normal. Between alchemy and plastic, his scenes propose a transmutation: to change one's thinking in order to see anew.
SERIE ALBEDO — RAÚL CAMPOS
2026 — OIL ON LINEN
TEXT — HELIO PAREJA AMADOR
Raúl Campos is interested in aesthetics and composition, but above all he is obsessed with the message. He paints in order to communicate: he uses drawing, line and colour not only to achieve a beautiful, static image but to stage complex scenes, stories left open to interpretation. And his point of departure is, deliberately, whatever we tend to dismiss:
“I paint madness, because sometimes we need to look from another angle at what we consider normal — because perhaps it is genuinely irrational. There is a line by Rita Mae Brown that said it in a way: true madness is expecting a different result while always doing the same thing.”
ANTES DEL GRITO, OIL/LINEN. 2026
Nothing in his paintings is incidental. The garments, the vases, the fish, the threads, the stones, even the colour: everything means something. White, for instance, points to the albedo: in alchemy, the point of purification reached after darkness, the moment of transition in the making of the philosopher's stone, when consciousness awakens. That idea of transformation sits at the centre of his work:
“I have always thought about transmutation, not as this search to turn coal into gold, but as a change in mental perception; being able to see something differently by changing how you think.”
But white is also the perfect space for creation: the field of every possibility. There the mind can invent anything, or stand still and stagnate; it is uncertainty and opportunity at once. That is why white is not there simply so the elements can breathe and the composition sit more harmoniously: Campos makes it interact with his figures and invites us to look into the mind of someone who seems mad, "the possibility that everything can be there at the same time and yet not appear."
STUDIO, QUERÉTARO
The plastic bags he turns into garments speak of the ephemeral and of the vulnerability with which we live in society: of what we are capable of doing in order to belong. They are objects that lost their function to take on a new meaning and a value that, seen with other eyes and at another moment, would be banal.
And within that logic, sanity and unreason end up trading places:
“Perhaps the mad are the truly sane.”
Perhaps what is genuinely irrational is the way we relate to one another today:
“We find ourselves in a moment of disconnection because of technology; paradoxically we are lonelier than ever, and painting allows us to make people feel emotions again.”
For all that, his work is not a critique: it is an invitation to rethink the everyday and to think twice before accepting as truths the ideas imposed on us. His work is a dialogue with the world we live in — or, in his words: "Art has a very important role in recovering our humanity."
