MARIO GARCíA TORRES
For his latest exhibition in Guadalajara, Mario García Torres chose the legendary Mexican goalkeeper, Jorge Campos, as collaborator. The project came about by chance and in its own timing, very much in keeping with the the exhibition’s theme: ‘El que la cambia la falla’ — He who changes it, fails. This title refers to the intuitive moment that comes before decisive, fateful gestures — both in sport and in art — that change the course of one and their collective’s narrative.
A few days after the Mexico - England World Cup match, we spoke over the phone about spontaniety on the soccer field, art-world cerebrality, intuition, and how bringing sport into an art context has allowed one of Mexico’s greatest living artists to escape his own practice.
text —
WILHELMINA MER
images —
courtesy of Museo de Arte de Zapopan
— mexico city, july 2026
WILHELMINA MER
images —
courtesy of Museo de Arte de Zapopan
— mexico city, july 2026
WILHELMINA MER — Mario.
MARIO GARCÍA TORRES — Hello — What's up? I was just running ahead of a lunch thing.
WBM — Are you in Mexico?
MGT — I'm in Mexico City, yes. And you — what's going on? You got a new apartment?
WBM — Yeah, so crazy. I was visiting Montréal and I saw this beautiful apartment and just signed for it the next day. I wasn't expecting it, but now I have this new place.
MGT — That's amazing. Enjoy it.
WBM — Thank you. I really, really loved the video you shared with me. The text was so beautiful. Congrats on the show. So tell me, how did this project with Jorge Campos come to be?
MGT — Well, all by happenstance, really. I found myself at a table with this guy Jorge Campos — a friend of a friend introduced us for some unclear reason. And Jorge Campos, if you don't know him, is a real icon of football in Mexico. Probably one of the two most important soccer players in the history of the sport there. His peak was mainly throughout the 90s.
He's such a charmer, such a funny guy, and when we met he was very willing to laugh about himself. Among the stories he was telling, he started mentioning how he was very famous for his jerseys. He and one other player in Europe were really at the very beginning of goalkeepers dressing in a very bright, extraordinary way. Before them, the tradition was dark colors — the goalkeeper was supposed to be invisible. And for some reason in the early 90s they both decided they didn't want to be invisible, which I find politically interesting.
So he's very famous for dressing in colorful ways. He got a lot of criticism for it at the beginning, and then eventually became very iconic. And in that first conversation, he started telling me he had actually been designing his own jerseys. That really got my attention — oh, okay, so this guy is not just a football player, he's also a creative mind. Through the little bits of information he was throwing into his stories, I thought: there's something interesting here, maybe I could do a project with him.
It took a long time. We talked every now and then about developing it, but I thought many times it wasn't going to happen — he's a very elusive person. He lives in LA, comes to Mexico probably every two weeks, always very volatile, making plans as he goes. We started talking about creating something together, he was excited, came to the studio a couple of times, we'd go back and forth — but it took months. More than a year for sure.
WBM — [laughs] A bit of a slippery guy.
MGT — Eventually the Museo de Arte de Zapopan got involved. I told someone I was working on this, word got to the director of the museum, and she called me: "Are you planning a show with Jorge Campos?" That invitation really pushed me to materialize things. At some point, because he's so slippery, I had to call him and say: listen, there's this opportunity, but we need to sign a contract. I can't commit to the museum if I don't know whether you're going to show up tomorrow or in six months.
WBM — So he signed it, then?
MGT — He was excited about it, and that's how it really started to take shape.
MGT — The first question I wanted to address was: how can we look at his work as art? How do we make something so that his designs are seen not just as jerseys but as design — discussed in terms of line, color, shape? His jerseys are basically geometric designs in very bright colors. So I thought, well, the first operation is to bring them into an art space. If I bring those designs in somehow, we can look at them as art and discuss whether they're interesting or not.
He asked: "Okay, but what are you doing?" He's not in the art world, so I said: maybe I can translate them into some kind of modernist space. Create variations, develop them as if it were a formal painting project. And that was really fun for me, because it allowed me to become a different kind of artist. I would probably never have thought of making these formal, colorful modernist paintings without this excuse. It gave me permission to scratch everything I know about my career and start thinking in a different way — which I've done in other projects. I try to create excuses to push myself to do something I wouldn't otherwise do. Otherwise it just makes no sense to keep repeating myself.
I think he was interested because he's a very curious person, always exploring new things. And there's something we discussed a lot: by the time most sportsmen are forty, they need to reinvent themselves. Jorge's story is no different — now he plays golf. That question of how you do that is very important to me, because I'm always trying to leave, in a way. Art is such a beautiful place to be — I think it's where the most interesting questions are asked and the most interesting people are, which is why I'm in the art world. But at the same time I'm always trying to escape. So having someone in front of me who has to reinvent themselves every ten years brought me to a lot of questions.
And I think that's partly why he was interested too. He recognized himself as a creative person, someone who had pushed a very specific agenda within something as constrained as a goalkeeper's jersey. He wanted to distinguish himself, create his own path. When I told him: you're kind of an artist — I think he was charmed by that. I don't think he will become an artist in the way we mean it. But he was charmed by the idea of looking at his own work from a different perspective.
WBM — You mentioned he faced criticism for the jerseys and for his visibility. Why was that?
MGT — He grew up in Acapulco, on the beach, and his real passion as a young person was surfing. The aesthetic of surf culture in the 1980s and early 90s is what fed his taste. And he was pushing that into a context that had no framework for it.
There's also something I find politically interesting: The logic of the goalkeeper at the time was to dress in dark colors ir order to disappear from the opponents view. But Campos wanted exactly the opposite, to be seen. The jerseys not only functioned as an act of empowerment for himself —as a way of saying out loud, I am here, and I can still stop the goal.
For a lot of people in soccer at the time, his jerseys made no sense. People would say, he's too loud, what is this — this isn't surf. He was always kind of playful, even in very high-stakes moments, which put him in a very strange space for a lot of people. But he kept insisting that was his thing, and as he became more famous, the jerseys became iconic rather than jarring.
WBM — There's a part in the video where you mention that when he takes off his goalkeeper jersey and runs to the field to shoot for goal, he's performing two roles in the same space. I wanted to ask — not so much about this specific iteration of the theme, but to give context on your broader preoccupation with the cinematic, with historical footage, with images and how they move and perform different roles through time.
MGT — Yeah. I'm interested in how images circulate and how their meaning keeps changing. Every time a work or an image is presented in a different context, in a different time, it becomes something else. I'm interested in that flexible space — in time, in memory, in how images drag time with them. At some point an image is contemporary, then it becomes memory, then it becomes a historical reference. It moves back and forth in time.
That's why, for the video, I set myself up to analyze popular culture images as if they were acts — documentation of a performance that could be read in art terms. And the more you look at an image, the more you fragment it, analyze it differently. I'm a believer in that — in spending time with works of art. It doesn't matter if they're immediately interesting; if you give them the right amount of time, you always learn something. So I thought: we should build this video through analyzing the most iconic images of Jorge Campos.
WBM — I loved it. Particularly the contrast between a physical, intuitive sport and the art context where we're always overthinking, always trying to put things into words. With the magazine I face that a lot, asking myself: why am I asking an artist to explain their work?
MGT — Exactly.
MGT — It's been a long time coming, and I think it connects to that escape I was describing. For the last ten years or so, I've been looking for ways to use my tools and my research in a more pop culture space. Sometimes it's bringing pop culture into art, and sometimes I'm at least trying to create work where the audience is wider than the art world. The show with Jorge Campos fulfills that — it's art that could potentially be seen and experienced by people who have no tools for discussing it in art terms. That back and forth between those worlds is what I've been trying to figure out.
What you saw at El Eco were stories related to famous episodes in sports history where failure was a critical moment. We wanted to relive those moments — and that's why we brought in sports commentators, because we developed this with my friend Don Juan, and part of the fantasy was reliving those moments in voices that were deeply familiar. These commentators — you might not even know their faces, but the voices have been in your life forever, repeated across years. Bringing them onto a stage for that was the idea.
WBM — And in terms of accessibility — the public being able to experience art in spaces and contexts where they wouldn't normally have the framework for it — what have you noticed about the reception of this show during the World Cup?
MGT — The show has two main bodies of work. One is these paintings — things that look like modernist paintings, based on the jersey designs — which create an atmosphere I hope reads like a 1950s modern museum. Those paintings are accompanied by drawings that I hope give them context. The other body is a number of paintings we made physically together: white canvases where soccer balls coated in paint were kicked by Jorge toward the canvas so that he could shoot them and make a print.
WBM — [laughs] Fun.
MGT — Very fun to make. We did different versions. And I think during the opening was my closest moment of understanding what was actually happening, partly because there were a number of soccer players and people from that world in the room.
When you talk about art to people who aren't involved in art, there's this particular thing that happens — you're speaking and the words seem to just float away. But at some point it always comes back to a very fundamental question in art, which is the gesture. The hand. In this case it was Jorge's leg — kicking the ball. And I think people got that. They understood that what they were looking at was the documentation of some kind of performance. That was really interesting to me, because I hope they'll look back at sport differently now — as something with lines, time, a beginning and an end. A narrative. A theater piece. I'm not passionate about soccer in the way a fan is, so I can look at it that way — as a thing that looks like theater. And I hope something began to take shape in people's minds in that sense, in that performative space of sports.
I can't say yet whether it was a successful project. It was really just the beginning of that discussion.
There's something I'd add that I don't think was perceived as a first layer at the show — it was probably more of a second layer. The video I sent you became more central than I originally intended. It wasn't meant to be. But it ended up describing the framework of the whole exhibition. It started as a kind of biographical piece, and then as we were writing it, it found its own voice and became larger.
One thing I became very focused on developing was this very romantic idea of creativity, or intuition — the genius, the magic of art. Which sounds conservative, maybe.
WBM — No, I was going to ask about that. I'm listening.
MGT — It's something I ask myself almost every day. Not as a black-and-white question, but I genuinely struggle with it: how to be in the space of creativity, of inspiration. How to be connected to yourself, to the material world, and to what people are thinking — all at the same time. All these things are always flying around us, and in order to make something I feel is successful, I need to be in that space.
And what started to happen, once I was developing the project with Jorge, was: I realized there's this thing in sports. Maybe you see it more clearly in individual sports — in tennis, you can very clearly see, oh, that player is inspired today. It's explained in a more organic way. But we don't ask that question about collective sports, about soccer. So I started thinking about it, and talking to Jorge about it: what makes something extraordinary happen on a football field?
There's a parallel in what a player searches for and what I try to connect to. I hope football fans will start thinking about the sport in that way too; where inspiration happens, how geniuses make something different one day to the next.
MGT — I think it's been a development in my practice over time. When I really started building my body of work, I was very involved in conceptual art and that criticality of 70s and 80s art — which led me toward a kind of hyper-responsibility for everything you do as an artist. Being hyper-conscious about absolutely everything. I wouldn't make anything before I was completely sure about every possible implication of a specific gesture. I wanted all my ideas to be fully formed and secure before anything was materialized. And not only that — I wanted to communicate my thinking in the most straightforward way possible.
I think that was a little bit of a lie that conceptual art gave us. A kind of hyper-consciousness of yourself as an artist in society. And little by little I've been letting go of that — allowing myself to make things in a more intuitive way. And also because I've come to think my role as an artist is less dictatorial, in the sense of pretending to influence people of what they think, and more that of someone who is part of society, trying to be aware of what's happening around them and find ways to materialize that — not necessarily to express what I think.
So in a way I'm relinquishing authorship, trying to open up and be more aware. I guess that's probably what you were referring to — getting to that space where I'm less of an author.
WBM — Yes, exactly.
MGT — And here in my studio, for the last ten or fifteen years, I've been involving more and more people in the creative process. I'm interested in how I can do something better through someone else. I need someone to come in and say: this could be better this way, not the way you're thinking — because the mind, most of the time, tries to repeat itself. It's very difficult to push your mind to do things differently each time.
So I think more and more of my work as a kind of script — defined as loosely as possible, then opened up to people from different perspectives so the ideas can develop almost publicly. It's almost like going out to a bar, talking to people, getting feedback from everywhere, and then materializing that. Something that one day I hope I can do even more literally — creating work in public, in real time.
WBM — It feels more alive, open to surprise and spontaneity, all those things we were talking about that happen on a soccer field. What has surprised you the most about this specific process, with this project?
MGT — I learned a lot from Jorge. Watching how he thinks about himself, his career, how he deals with the everyday — I learned a lot about the ability to change and reinvent oneself. In the art world we have a lot of rules. We think a lot about coherence. There's an expectation of what an artist is, and if there's a history to an artist, people expect them to keep repeating themselves — there's almost a defined space of what you're allowed to do.
WBM — This idea of reinvention reminds me of how you look at memory and archival content. The way a document changes with time, how the historical moment morphs, how the aura of an image shifts. Were there any moments during this project that made you see your own personal history differently?
MGT — I think what this project made me do was go back and review my own relationship to soccer and how that brought me somewhere I don't often go. I watch soccer like any common person — it's not my favorite sport, I don't follow it very closely. But in terms of time, it really pushed me to think about different memories and how I could relate to them.
I'm quite interested in breaking those rules of time. History is always told in a chronological way — one thing after the other. And one of the main goals of my practice, in a way, has been to understand time differently. And geography too. Trying to push myself to communicate and work with different ideas, different personalities and subjectivities that I might not have met before or that it wasn't physically possible to encounter.
What this project did specifically was force me to review my own teenage memories in relation to soccer — music, dance, body movements, how I move today, how that was shaped by my teenage experience. I had never really brought that into an artwork before. It was a funny exercise to go back to a place I don't often visit — I left my city so long ago, my daily life has very little to do with that. Usually it's other people's memories I'm working with. This time it was mine.
WBM — Okay, here’s my last question. The video opens with "¿Cómo no te voy a querer?" — why?
MGT — It was a somewhat capricious choice. That's the catchphrase — the motto that goes with the branding of Pumas, the team where Jorge Campos first played in Mexico City. They use it during games, there's a song around it. I was always attracted to that phrase — ¿Cómo no te voy a querer? How could I not love you?
It's such a beautiful thing to say. It implies: you're so good that there's no reason I cannot love you. I cannot not love you. And I was always drawn to the image of these soccer fans — this very specific team, a very masculine culture, people drinking and yelling passionately — and then sometimes singing, how can I not love you?
So I thought: I should give this piece the same title. It brings Campos back to his earliest stage, the team that first gave him attention, in this space that was all tough winning men — who were also, at the same time, singing to each other a song about love.