NO DURAR, SER ETERNO
October 30, 2019

Luis Hampshire's painting announces his arrival in the same way that a closet or a butt cupboard announces his collapse: if we open the door, a world of forces has to start walking. Unlike a catastrophe in the kitchen, the shock that his work offers us wishes to occur in our favor and in favor of a rich repertoire of resonant operations for the Mexican painting of our time. The diversity in this ecology of gestures must be impossible to ignore.

In Hampshire's work we find fragments, bodies and objects, but not a mutilation; Never a violence Rather, twisting and trimming arise; use, rest and jump. The shapes between the limbs, the shapes between the fingers. Multiplicity of action: cut a color, separate a figure, prepare a support, counteract the rest of the eye, throw it and stretch it through the grooves of the plane. It does not hurt to return the thoughts to the kitchen: as sesame or pepper blacken to transform the flavor, but also the color of food, so also the structures of Hampshire claim the importance of selecting this or that preparation for the internal and external functions of the painting. Considering the grinding or the fire, and his metaphor in the painter's work, what really interests me to rescue are not the simple culinary similes, but the vital line that arises when we think so much about the real transformation of the ingredients, as in the complex fabric of forces and times that invokes the work of painting. That of Luis Hampshire is a vitalist painting, a series of practices that have passed on multiple occasions through the hands of the artist and that have obtained a complicity with the game, with the transformation and with the taste for the accumulation of eggshells, tatters and seeds

That energy seems to be also related to the particular role that light plays in your work. The illuminations of Hampshire generate shadows that give the works a sense of perforation: a light that passes through the events, bringing with them a transitory balance. Sometimes it reminds of a set and sometimes I think of objects arranged next to a window; next to the false window of trompe l'oeil or trampantojo. The structural or additive aspect of work, trimming, cancellation and other operations, reinforce this idea of double and triple shadows, of diverse light sources, captured by an uncertain assembly whose best values are to hide their beginnings: the appearance and disappearance of illusion and enlightenment. The collage, frequently used, denies us the possibility of understanding the exact origin of certain gestures and in this impossibility an intention also shows parts of the same mystery and liveliness.

That of Hampshire is an active and diligent imagination, where the above and below are clear, where things happen right in front of us, as a tribute to both the logic of the column and the confetti. His work suggests the demands of painting everything that is sustained and that sustains the rest: that fascinating and fruitless company in which countless networks of weight and inertia continually celebrate the escape of their purposes by setting foot and rolling together, between laughs, down the stairs.

- Christian Camacho
MA Royal College of Art, London