Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Israel Campos: Echoes, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. Campos excavates the layered cultural histories of Los Angeles using a combined painting and screenprinting technique. In his role as artist-historian, Campos reveals the figures, stories, and myths that echo through the city’s history, folding Mexican folklore into its fabric and often drawing from primary texts for narrative and stylistic inspiration. In adapting the stylistic conventions of pre-Columbian painting, Campos thins the veil between past and present, physical and mythological, turning the fresh eye of history onto the toofamiliar climate disasters and political failings of the 21st century. But the presence of history offers its own kind of hope – cultures have clashed and commingled before and will do so again, yet their stories live on just below the surface, waiting to reveal themselves to the open-eyed observer.
