Luís Campos

"Fading" is an exhibition about memory and disappearance. It is a set of photographs of wild animals in their natural habitat, taken over 12 years in 14 countries such as Cuba, Brazil, Kenya, Mexico, Canada, Zimbabwe, Botswana, USA, Argentina, Indonesia, Maldives, Ecuador (Galápagos), Colombia and Sri Lanka. These are black and white photographs, with a faint black ellipse around a central image, which alludes to a cinematographic process of the disappearance of the image.They are photographs that keep the memory of figures, bodies, smells, horizons, light spectrums, contrasts and emotional experiences of multiple encounters with wild animals, so diverse, but also so close to us humans in biology, in the behavior, expressions, looks and our common destiny. These are beings that see their habitats disappear dramatically, due to deforestation, hunting, crops, livestock, human overpopulation and climate change. These are not representations of animals or photographs of nature, but rather a reinterpretation of fleeting images, of fading memories, of a disappearing world, which is ours. These images are a ritual of separation, a cry of pain lost in an immense chorus, which pretend to wake people up to these threats that hang over our future and over the future of generations to come.
This exhibition will be complemented with a color video where the underwater dance of a sea lion and a seal, in slow motion, will be interspersed with data on the degradation of ecosystems and the risk of extinction of animals and plants. The process of capturing these images involves a contradiction, because tourism in wilderness areas contributes, in itself, to this process of destruction, but that fact is something that has to be accepted and this exhibition is an indelible redemption of that consequence.
Luís Campos

Luís Campos (Lisboa, Portugal, 1955)
He held his first individual exhibition in 1981, in Lagos, at the invitation of the painter Joaquim Bravo. Member of the “Ether” group in 1982, where he studied the History of Photography with António Sena. Since then, he has held 23 individual exhibitions and participated in 52 collective exhibitions in Portugal and abroad, highlighting, among others, the 1st Art Biennial in Johannesburg, the first exhibition of post-apartheid contemporary art, Canal Isabel II and ICO Foundation, in Madrid, Kunstmuseum, in Bonn, Staatliche Gallery, in Halle, National Museum of Art Korean Contemporary, in Seoul, and Parc de La Vilette, in Paris. He was represented by Luís Serpa gallery until the gallerist passed away. He is represented in the collections of the PLMJ Foundation, António Cachola, Museo Extremeño e IberoAmericano de Arte Contemporâneo (MEIAC) in Badajoz, Museu da Imagem in Braga, Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) and the Gulbenkian Foundation, among others. In 2002, he received the Medal of the Conseil Général des Hauts-de-Seine at the Salon d`Art Contemporain de Montrouge.