OMR is pleased to announce Pia Camil’s third solo exhibition with the gallery: 'Deseo, deseo' which opens Thursday, September 19, 2024 from 6–9pm on the occasion of GAMA Week 2024. The result of Camil’s recent artist residency at The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California, Deseo, deseo sees the artist return to her foundations in painting as she explores desire as a rebellious and liminal force: an erotic impulse that defies precise definitions and seeks to reconnect artistic practice with the pleasure of the creative act.

'Deseo, deseo' is a site-specific project that transforms the gallery into a universe where raw and explicit paintings of female bodies are lit directly. The black-painted walls, crossed by a galactic graffiti mural, generate an immersive atmosphere that suggests the expansive and infinite possibilities of desire and creation.

Pia Camil’s artistic development is rooted in painting—a discipline that, starting at the age of 14, led her to an interest in representing the human body through her early life drawing classes. In this exhibition, her first solo show dedicated to canvas painting, Camil revisits that foundation from a critical and spiritual perspective, questioning and reconfiguring traditional approaches to painting in order to explore the body, a topic always present in her work, through the erotic.

'Deseo, deseo' is also an autobiographical exhibition where Camil reflects on processes of personal reconstruction, using painting as a medium to reconnect with life and desire through art. By addressing the erotic from a personal angle, the artist builds a narrative that challenges imposed limitations, opening up space for a creative act that overflows both the intimate and the collective.

Audre Lorde defines the erotic as “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire”. She also asserts, “when I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”1

Stripped of the patriarchal gaze, the erotic becomes a powerful force that not only sustains and generates life but also serves as a bridge between the social, political, and spiritual. However, this force is continuously threatened by heteronormative and capitalist systems that attempt to reduce the erotic to the purely pornographic and carnal.

All the works in the exhibition were created during Pia Camil’s recent artist residency at The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California, USA (July 2024).
1. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” pp. 53-59.