Déficit is not a residency in the strict sense of the word. It is closer to a group of painters deciding to get together, to talk about painting, and to make work while sustaining a collective conversation. There is no official application process and no open call, and Juan Manuel Salas and Miriam Hernández, who run the project together, are transparent about the reason, which is that they want an intimate space to share with friends. Painters have been doing this for as long as they have had something to argue about, from the butcher's shop that Die Brücke took over in Dresden in 1905 to the loft that The Club rented on East Eighth Street in 1949. In Guadalajara, Déficit holds some remnants of those older gatherings.

This closeness matters and is noticeable. The friendship, the exchange based on long conversations, the passion for painting, and the care these artists share for one another are reflected in the projects presented.

On this occasion there are two, and although they function independently, they can also be read as two parts of the same exploration: Vica, by Andrew Roberts, and Rosa, by Mauricio Muñoz. Both adopt illegibility as a poetic device, denoting that which is epistemologically indeterminate, and both work through an interplay between material and perceptual forms of vulnerability, between object and vision.

Vica takes its name from a steam bath in Tijuana, and it starts from a personal and intimate experience, that of inhabiting those spaces as a gay man. Roberts, who returns here to painting, uses the medium as a vehicle for opacity. The works are placed above urinals, a spatial wink at the kind of place they come from, and they simulate a fisheye effect that unfolds diffuse scenes before the eye, bodies suspended over humid surfaces. In some of them, the artist adds wax glazes to produce a vaporous appearance, making it harder to decipher what is being shown. One can barely make out groups of bodies interacting in monochromatic spaces, represented as skeletons inside bear costumes.

They are bears—in the typological sense of the word—but seen through X-rays, and it is never clear whether they are really bears or people in costume. Roberts plays once again with the infinite desire to categorize, to capture something in its totality, at the same time as that desire is interwoven with opacity, with an incapacity to see completely. And it is precisely this opacity, the steam that invades the room and blurs the bodies, that allows for a dissident freedom, a way of existing and of expressing desire and sexuality that escapes the norms operating elsewhere. The urinals above which the paintings are displayed point to the same thing. Communal urinals, despite being found in spaces coded as heterosexual and very masculine, hold an almost homoerotic closeness between male bodies.

According to Diego Olmos's text for the exhibition, once one crosses the thresholds of spaces such as baths or steam rooms, the administration of identity is suspended and bodies are immersed in a dynamic of shared anonymity where the exchange of information is reduced to a minimum, and opacity organizes the forms of contact and communication. Steam, humidity, and half-light blur social class, sexualities, and hierarchies, and encounters between men are mediated by codes that are never made explicit. Recognition of the other becomes unnecessary, because the bond is formulated from absolute anonymity. Roberts does not illustrate that condition. He builds a painting that behaves like it.

Rosa takes its name from a sex shop in Tijuana, Muñoz's home city, and the artist calls it the agora of love. For him, the space is not only the memory of a commercial establishment but a spatial pretext that summons a series of images loaded with desire, consumption, and fantasy, the ones he grew up with. There is no room and no time to browse. You know what you came for, even if you are not conscious of it. What he places before us is a cabin with a peephole, and inside it an animation made from the artist's own paintings, images that reimagine the saturated, explicit, and exaggerated aesthetic of the sexual advertisements that circulated for years in newspapers, magazines, and urban spaces. Among the overflowing bodies, the artist reclaims figures expelled from normative representations of desire and returns to the eye a set of popular visualities that were always there.

These images, more than soothing or producing pleasure, confront us as the consumers we also are. Olmos's text reaches here for Guy Hocquenghem, who warned in 1973 of the way capitalism shapes our ideas of freedom and desire until it infiltrates even the sexual experiences that appear to escape its rules. From the marital bed to the brothel, the public bath, the sex shop, and the cabin, sexuality ends up organized under official models that promise liberation while producing frustration, scarcity, and constant demand. Desire circulates as another form of consumption, and bodies remain trapped inside the very structures that claimed to offer them freedom. Painting works here as a pretext for building an apparatus, where the animation, the cabin, and the aesthetic of the sex shop confront the canons that still determine the way we look and the way we desire.

Both projects sit within a set of ideas that has been circling for some time. Édouard Glissant argued that in order to understand someone on the terms of transparency, we first must measure them against a scale that lets us compare and judge, and that to do so we have to reduce them. He asked instead for the right to opacity—that which is not enclosure but subsistence within an irreducible singularity, opacities that can coexist and converge and weave a fabric that should be read for the texture of its weave and not for the nature of its components. Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad has carried this notion into the image, proposing that art which foregrounds a lack of clarity makes us aware of the limits of sight, and that indefinite images remind us that clarity need not equal candor. Nicholas de Villiers has named the queer version of it, an opacity that is neither the transparency of being out nor the concealment of being in, but a practice that resists confession and fixed identity categories as obligatory conditions of existing.

The dream of optimal transparency drives image industries, and it drives exhibitions too. It is expected that the work can be seen and assimilated, that its meaning can be seen and assimilated, and that the artist can be seen and assimilated along with both. Vica and Rosa refuse on all three counts, and they can do so here because Déficit is a house with painters in it and not an institution with an audience to satisfy. Rather than offering us bodies to decipher, both projects propose that the bodies in the steam and the bodies behind the peephole are visibly present and impossible to make out, shifting from image to threshold, from legibility to encounter, and inviting us to accept that there are places where identity remains obscure, including our own, and that this is not something to be corrected.

Déficit is located at C. José Luis Verdía 577, Barragán Hernández, Guadalajara.