With Ostillo Art Foundation, Collector René Campos Wants to Challenge How Texas Sees Art
Observer ·
His new nonprofit art space, led by Sacha Zerbib, debuted with works by Glenn Ligon, Marlene Dumas, Kader Attia and Thomas Struth in an inaugural exhibition that draws on Baldwin, the commedia dell'arte and the history of African art to question how images shape and distort meaning.
A new foundation has just opened in Austin, as the Texas art scene continues to flex its muscles with studios, galleries and unconventional art spaces. A largely self-sustaining cultural geography has developed across the state since the postwar era and continues to thrive today without needing much attention from outside, yet increasingly, Texas is being recognized by the wider art world as a contemporary cultural destination worth checking out. Austin, in particular, may be more of a music city, but the new Ostillo Art Foundation aims to shuffle the deck, claiming a place for the city within Texas’s art ecosystem.
Newly opened in September, it is the brainchild of Austin real estate developer and collector René Campos . With him on the journey from idea to implementation was Sacha Zerbib , the Paris- and Austin-based art adviser who has guided his collecting for years and now serves as Ostillo’s founding director and chief curator.
After studying at UT Austin and earning an M.B.A. from Harvard, Campos made his fortune in real estate. He founded Eureka Holdings in 2001 after co-founding Hartex Property Group, a multifamily investment and management company that amassed more than 14,000 residential units, reportedly valued at more than $500 million, before it was sold. Over the past nine years, he has assembled a collection that numbers close to 100 works. He deliberately chose not to put his own name on the art center, even as it reflects his tastes. Ostillo instead takes its name from Ostilio Ricci , the Italian mathematics professor who taught Galileo and gave him the intellectual foundations that would enable him to revolutionize science.
The decision to establish a nonprofit, public-facing foundation brought a new sense of responsibility to Campos’s collecting practice. Once a public institution became the goal, acquisitions were approached with greater historical rigor and a heightened awareness of what building a collection for public display entails. “From the beginning, we have tried to have what I would call a museum-like selection practice and to select what we consider relevant to art history,” Zerbib tells Observer. “We spend a lot of time researching and selecting the artists that we want for the foundation. Once we have identified an artist, we spend a great deal of time choosing the right series,” he continues. “There has always been that disciplined approach to selecting art. And that is also why it is not about us. It is about art.”
Austin was a deliberate choice as well; it’s a rapidly expanding city where culture plays an important role but contemporary art still has room to grow. “We felt there was room to do it,” he says. “You have the Blanton Museum and the Contemporary Austin, and there was space for another platform where we could present things that speak to the identity of the collection and what the foundation stands for.”
Zerbib describes the collection’s identity as uncompromising and thought-provoking—the aim is not passive viewing but challenging the audience long after the first encounter. “They are challenging in themselves, but they are also challenging to viewers. They make you ask questions about what the artworks are about and about everything that surrounds them,” he says.
The inaugural show, “ Masquerade ,” offers a strong sense of what the collection stands for. Here, a term rooted in the idea of masking and decoy, becomes a strategy for using images and language to insert new meanings into a seemingly linear narrative. It is a strategy of concealment and dialectical tension that can preserve critical thinking before an image, particularly today, when an oversaturated visual environment so often triggers a passive, disenchanted and uncritical absorption.
“The identity of ‘Masquerade’ really defines what the foundation is about, linking to references to culture and popular culture, but also to historical subjects,” Zerbib explains, drawing a parallel with the commedia dell’arte, which is represented in the show. At its center is a new commission by German artist Thomas Struth , Fratelli , which visibly anchors the exhibition: four monumental male figures that, for some, may recall the seemingly distant totalitarianisms of the early 20th Century, even as history repeats itself before our eyes through strikingly similar dynamics. Their mask-like faces, with exaggerated physiognomic expressions and a theatrical presence, move from portraiture toward caricature, recalling the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte—masks of power and authority, not unlike many that surround us today.
Other works translate the concept more directly into the history of Texas and slavery, migration stories and the state’s multicultural character, while also reflecting the richness of its performance and entertainment traditions. Lending the show its title is an abstract work by Glenn Ligon , Masquerade #9 (2006), part of a series in which the artist draws on James Baldwin ’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village,” written after a stay in a small Swiss village where Baldwin reflected on being perceived as radically foreign and on the performance required in trying to “fit in.” Using silkscreen, Ligon transfers passages from the essay onto the canvas in ink and coal dust, creating dense, anomalous fields of language in which the words gradually become obscured. The material itself carries symbolic weight, recalling Baldwin’s account of others describing his hair as “the color of tar,” while the title Masquerade refers to another passage in which Baldwin describes children celebrating Carnival with blackened faces.
Here, Ligon’s emulation of the forceful psychic flow of Abstract Expressionism produces a surface that camouflages without obscuring meaning, burying meaning within layered abstraction even as the words remain present beneath the paint. Ligon has said he “used that part of the text because it is about doubling and obscuring, and the text itself is being obscured by the material in which it is rendered.” The result translates the stratified nature of meaning-making, a heavily layered canvas that mirrors the similarly stratified nature of memory, particularly amid today’s relentless flow of information and our diminishing capacity to absorb and process it.
Another powerful presence is Sylvia Snowden ’s viscerally expressive abstraction, whose highly physical approach unfolds through distortion, materiality and chromatic tension, letting the act of painting channel psychic forces that remain unfiltered in the collision between mind and world. More visceral and intuitive still is Marlene Dumas’s Voodoo Child (1996): its fluid, dreamlike, ghostly figure takes shape through diluted ink and watercolor, producing bleeding washes and unstable contours that capture the equally unstable definition of human existence between spirit and body, once the Cartesian divide gives way to a unity from which some of the richest forms of human expression can emerge.
María Berrío ’s Distant Gods and Aging Suns (2024) likewise evokes the nature of human memory and consciousness: hand-cut pieces of Japanese paper are collaged together in a dialectical tension between fragments of meaning that reveal new readings over time. The richness and joy of the image—youthful figures in elaborate costumes—disguise the complexity of its construction, much like the perfectly idealized, algorithmically optimized images that surround us today.
Several works investigate the political connotations of masquerade more directly, in particular the mask and performance as weapons against power, whether to reveal the truth or to say what could not otherwise be said publicly. Yet masks and costumes can just as easily be absorbed into collective rituals and shared value systems, reinforcing rather than disrupting the reassuring sense of wealth, safety and stability promoted by a city’s dominant narrative.
Masquerading can thus become a strategy to confront, mimic, define and defy the manipulation of history, as Salman Toor’s The History Room (2022) suggests through its unresolved yet fluid tension between discovery and remembrance, between inherited tropes and ideals of beauty and their critical interrogation. A similar approach informs Kader Attia’s Mirror Mask (2021), which explores how individuals and societies negotiate memory, loss and historical trauma. Inspired by a visit to “Picasso and the Masters” in Paris, from which African objects were conspicuously absent despite their acknowledged impact on European modernism, Attia sets out to “repair” that manipulated history. Through a totemic mask assembled from shattered mirrors, he reclaims the formative role of African art in the emergence of Cubism, forcing the viewer to confront a history of appropriation understood not as a closed episode but as one of relentless hybrid exchange, dialogue and contamination.
The mask itself becomes subject to endless manipulation and reconfiguration in Adam Pendleton’s Untitled (masks) (2018-19). Pendleton printed a motif inspired by a Dan mask from Liberia across four separate sheets, intervening on each with a distinct abstract design that activates an endlessly metamorphic image of Black culture and identity, repeatedly mediated, transformed and reconfigured across histories and geographies.
The show invites us to contemplate how our notions of identity and meaning remain suspended between psyche and body, consciousness and the subconscious—essentially abstract subjects of endless, fluid reinterpretation. As Christopher Wool’s Rorschach-inspired silkscreen suggests, suspended between recognition and ambiguity stands an image of the self: a deeper truth that asks to be accepted more than interpreted, beyond the mask.
The foundation plans to stage two exhibitions a year. While the collection will remain the core of the program, Zerbib stresses that the institution is not conceived as a permanent display of privately owned works. The inaugural presentation includes loans from private collections, and future exhibitions may draw on loans from museums, foundations, institutions and other collectors.
The foundation also intends to keep commissioning artists. Some commissioned works have entered the collection, and Zerbib expects commissions to become an increasingly important part of the program once acquisitions resume; for the past year, much of the budget has gone toward completing and opening the physical space.
To keep the space active year-round, the foundation is building out public programming, including lectures, performances and film screenings, as well as access to its art library. Alongside the exhibition, Ostillo is presenting a lecture series led by director of exhibitions and art historian Dr. Jean Capeille exploring the relationship between art history and modern entertainment. Drawing on Capeille’s doctoral research on American vaudeville, the program offers a broad reflection on how artistic practices intersect with traditions of spectacle. Each lecture concludes with a guided tour of the exhibition, giving participants a chance to engage more directly with the themes the works raise.
Zerbib also sees institutional collaboration as fundamental to Ostillo’s role in Austin. The foundation is discussing loans, performances and screenings with local organizations and lending works from its collection to museums. For him and Campos, the objective is to nourish relationships across the city’s cultural ecosystem. “Hopefully those conversations continue to develop.”