In this, the first exhibition in a Mexican commercial gallery of the Uruguayan artist based in the United States, Luis Camnitzer, LABOR, along with Alexander Gray Associates, explores his artistic output from the 1960s to the present. It is of particular interest to us to present in Mexico City not only the works most relevant to the Latin American experience but also those that have impacted the development of global conceptual art over the past sixty years.
Thus, the political meaning of Camnitzer's work, as well as the meaning of the political in conceptual art and contemporary life, takes a central role. Beyond the literal references to the development of the Latin American guerrilla movements and the repression by dictatorships, these works as a whole scathingly dismantle the exercise of power in all spheres of human life. This broad sense of the political is already present in Camnitzer's work while Foucault was still a child, and it reverberates in its universal simplicity every time a new audience encounters it. At the heart of Camnitzer's exploration, both formal and conceptual, lies the explicitness of the audience's involvement and the revelation of the communicative circuit that not only allows every work of art to exist but also allows every message to be inserted into the psyche of the recipient.
Beyond the Concrete poetry that precedes it or the graphic art, the typographic and literary resources used by Camnitzer in this selection of works reveal the viewer's constant involvement in modern mechanisms such as advertising and propaganda, whether as a new necessity or as the revelation of an ancient truth. It is in the constant disquisition surrounding the psychic mechanisms of the contemporary world that the artist acquires his true and universal political meaning. In Camnitzer, the political aspect is far from being found solely in the theme or the historical reference; the artist analyzes and discovers in the very operations of the message: its construction, its appellative and sophistic character, and its possible reproduction ad nauseam; the construction of the sense of truth, since power begins to be exercised when another is convinced of a proposition, no matter how alien to reality it may be.