Jorge Camacho

Jorge Camacho is an established Cuban artist who works in a surrealist style. He belongs to the so-called Third Generation of Cuban painters, and like other artists of his time, he was sensitive to the impact of the multiple abstract currents that were circulating through the world at that time. His art is influenced by painters such as Tamayo, Miró, Bacon, Tanguy and, of course, Wifredo Lam, who was decisive in his youth.

On a trip to Paris in 1959, André Breton invited him to participate in the activities of the surrealist group. In 1967 he returns to Cuba to participate in the Salon de Mayo. During his stay on the Island, he meets Reinaldo Arenas and holds a personal exhibition. Back in Europe, his spirit, always eager for knowledge, led him to the study of alchemy, an experience that he later reflects in his work as well as the study of birds, music and literature.

Jorge Camacho, through the perfect treatment of line and color, develops a painting that is nourished by elements deeply rooted in his unconscious, coming from a sum of American traditions and cultures whose rituals and distinctive features are evident in the mysterious metamorphism of his beings and in the use of unusual bone configurations and structures with marked totemic character.

Jorge Camacho, Cuban painter settled in Doñana since the early 70s, died at age 77 after a long illness that had kept him away from the cultural world since 2009.

The painter had a strong connection with Andalusia that was born thanks to one of his hobbies: ornithology. On a trip to Venezuela in the early 70s to take photographs of birds, he met Javier Castroviejo, then director of the Doñana National Park, who convinced him to visit the Coto, to which the Cuban agreed.

What was supposed to be a stay of a few months ended up becoming an almost permanent residence in Doñana, where Camacho bought the Los Pajares estate in 1973, five kilometers from Almonte, where he has been living until three years ago during nine-month periods that he alternated with El Rocío, Seville and Paris, places where he also had homes.

Since he settled his residence in Los Pajares, Camacho fed himself with the magical landscapes of Doñana to paint and prepare his exhibitions, most of which he presented in Paris, a city he arrived in 1959 on a scholarship from the revolution and where he formed an intimate friendship with the founder of Surrealism, André Breton, who even came to write the texts for one of his Parisian exhibitions.

"That first approach to a Doñana that was beginning to take a position of privilege as a reference for nature throughout the world, prompted the author to decide to establish a residence in the municipality of Almonte," explained Juan Bautista Cáceres, director of the Pinacoteca of this town, which has dedicated one of its rooms to Jorge Camacho.

After his arrival in Paris in 1959, Camacho would not return to Cuba until 1967, the year he made contact with a series of intellectuals among whom José Lezama Lima and Reinaldo Arenas stood out. "It was then when he saw the ugliest face of the revolution and began to distance himself from it," according to his friend, the novelist from Almonte, Juan Villa.

Villa recalls that Arenas was a "fundamental figure" in Jorge Camacho's life, as was André Breton, whom he met in 1960. "Jorge always spoke of Reinaldo with passion and emphasized how much he had marked him," explains Villa, for whom the Cuban painter was "the best person I have ever known in my life, both personally and artistically."

Camacho died in a hospital in Paris after a long and painful illness. His last exhibition took place at the Water Museum in Lisbon in June 2011. Camacho's works are in important museums throughout the world, as his work achieved great international impact.