Jorge Camacho

Biography

In Venezuela Jorge Camacho saw the ibijau, a bird that afterwards appears again and again in his paintings. Birds occupied him seriously. At the Galerie Maeght in Paris he showed a painted “History of Birds”, at the Galerie Mathias Fels photographs he had taken himself, and in Spain he stayed for long periods in Seville and Almonte to watch birds in the Doñana National Park.

He also loved jazz and flamenco, wrote poetry, and was drawn to alchemy and the occult.

He was born on 5 January 1934 in Havana, into a bourgeois family. He never studied painting anywhere. In 1951 he dropped out of law school and began to paint. Back in the late 1940s a friend, Carlos M. Luis, had introduced him to the work of Klee, Miró, Tanguy and de Chirico. In 1953 Camacho went to Mexico for a year, where with the painter José Luis Cuevas he looked into the sources of Maya culture. His first strong impression was the Wifredo Lam exhibition at the University of Havana in 1955; among those who influenced him he himself also named Rufino Tamayo, Miró, Tanguy and Francis Bacon. He had exhibitions in Havana in 1955 and 1958, and in 1959 he received an honourable mention in São Paulo and moved to Paris.

In Paris he turned at once to Surrealism, and in 1960 he exhibited with Raymond Cordier. In 1961 the sculptor Agustín Cárdenas, an old friend, introduced him to André Breton, and from then on Camacho belonged to the Surrealist group. His second solo exhibition, “The Immaculate Conception of the Popes” (1962) at Daniel Cordier’s, was organised together with the group and inspired by the fiercely anticlerical writings of the German author Oskar Panizza. In 1964 Breton wrote a preface for his exhibition at the Galerie Mathias Fels and called this painting a painting of cruelty. The pictures of those years, with their claw-like forms and ossuaries, took their harsh themes from Sade and Bataille.

In 1967 he made a short trip to Cuba and met the writer Reinaldo Arenas there, whose books he later helped rescue from oblivion. In the same year Raymond Roussel inspired his exhibition “HARR” and a collection of poems, “L’Arbre acide”. Then came alchemy: the exhibition “Le Ton haut” (1969) grew out of traditional alchemy, which René Alleau and Eugène Canseliet had brought back into currency in Surrealist circles, and “The Dance of Death” at the Galerie de Seine (1975 or 1976) opened with a preface by Alleau himself, who explained why the skull matters so much in his paintings. In 1978, together with Alain Gruger, he published a hermetic treatise of his own, “Héraldique alchimique nouvelle”. Camacho illustrated poems by Jean-Pierre Duprey, Gilbert Lely, Guy Cabanel, Joyce Mansour and Claude Tarnaud, and translated the Haitian poet Magloire Saint-Aude into French.

A journey to Peru gave him his first sand landscapes; in 1984 they were shown at the Galerie Albert Loeb under the title “The Philosophy of the Landscape”, in a nod to shamanism. “Everyone talks about Surrealism, but very few understand it,” he said. His work is in museums in Paris, Caracas, Amsterdam and Brussels, in the Valencian Institute of Modern Art and in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2003 the Maison de l’Amérique latine in Paris held a retrospective of his work, and the same year the Galerie Tessa Hérold showed “The Book of Flowers”, a flora he had reinvented. Where he lived after 1975 is hard to say for certain: according to some accounts in Paris, according to others between Paris and Andalusia. His last exhibition in his lifetime took place in 2010 at the Water Museum in Lisbon.

Jorge Camacho died on 30 March 2011 in Paris, in the 15th arrondissement.