Jorge Camacho Biography
Jorge Camacho was born in Havana on January 5, 1934. Self-taught, his early reading led him to become interested in surrealism. The European magazines and books of André Breton, Paul Éluard and Georges Peret opened him to the discovery of an entire creative and intellectual universe, although Camacho always recognized that it was Paul Gauguin's painting and life that decided his pictorial vocation. His restlessness led him to travel outside the Caribbean island, and he ended up in Peru and Mexico, where muralists (Siqueiros, Orozco) dominated, who did not interest him at all and caused him great disappointment when he saw "extremely politicized art". . However, in Mexico City he found Rufino Tamayo and Carlos Mérida, then marginalized by the muralists with a fervent Stalinist ideology. Tamayo strongly influenced him, as did the works of Wilfredo Lam, and later Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy. Shortly thereafter, in 1959, Camacho traveled to Paris, where he met the Cuban sculptor Agustín Cárdenas, a close friend of André Breton. This is how Camacho and Breton meet, a decisive meeting, since the writer invites Camacho to be part of the surrealist group and its activities, today already historical facts consubstantial with modern art. Camacho acknowledged years later at the University of La Laguna in San Cruz de Tenerife, during a conference on surrealism, that this was "the beginning of a new artistic and intellectual life". With a prismatic and coherent career, Camacho was, as well as a painter, draftsman, engraver, poet and photographer. He is deeply interested in readings of esotericism and alchemy and delves into Sade, Bataille and Panizza. In 1961 Breton wrote the texts for his first solo exhibition in Paris and in 1965 included it in the canon Le surréalisme et la peinture (Gallimard).
Jorge Camacho's last trip to his native Cuba was in 1967 for the Paris May Salon in Havana, where his paintings were exhibited alongside those of Picasso, Lam, Ernst and other greats. But that journey is of greater collateral importance. Camacho and Margarita meet the writer Reinaldo Arenas and begin a lifelong friendship. Camacho, who felt the environmental disappointment of the island and the repressive situation, managed to get some manuscripts out of Cuba on that occasion. Engaged in the fight for freedom in Cuba, in 1988 he wrote and published a harsh letter to Fidel Castro in which he asked for justice for the Cuban people. On that occasion his paintings temporarily disappeared from the rooms of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana. Belonging to the so-called third generation of modern Cuban painting, Jorge Camacho achieved a consecrated, recognizable, distinctive style, from his ranges of browns calmed by a disturbing gray shadow to his unstable architectures or his imaginary beings, with interiors in which the bone configurations and totemic structures painted with care and preciousness.
