Ángel Cammen: Salaverna

As part of the fall program at BODEGA — the new exhibition space of OMR dedicated to emerging practices and curatorial experimentation — we are pleased to present SALAVERNA, Ángel Cammen’s first solo exhibition in Mexico City.

Ángel Cammen (Nuevo León, 1997) has developed an intimate and introspective painting practice marked by strong narrative threads, where personal history, grief, queer experience, and affective genealogy intertwine. His work does not illustrate but distills: it captures suspended moments — visions, dreams, or everyday scenes — that reveal a continuous search for identity and belonging.

In SALAVERNA, Cammen approaches the story of the Zacatecan town of the same name, birthplace of his maternal grandmother and site of an ongoing process of territorial dispossession caused by open-pit mining. Through a new series of paintings created specifically for this exhibition, he constructs an emotional geography that connects family memory with environmental devastation, transforming uprootedness into a poetic form of return, personal narrative, and living memory. Maguey plants, red earth, crumbling walls, and ghostly portraits come together in scenes that oscillate between the symbolic and the autobiographical. Cammen does not depict SALAVERNA as a lost place, but as a living fissure — a rupture where the past resists erasure and painting becomes an act of testimony, resistance, and care.

‍‍

Special thanks to Clarissa Navarro for her support in coordinating the project.