What We Learned From Jorge Camacho

It was the show Five Paintings at Dusk at François Ghebaly New York that turned me onto the late Cuban Surrealist painter Jorge Camacho. I had heard the name in art circles in the past, sort of this mythical “last surrealist at the dinner table,” and christened by Breton as such, but had never heard his name outside of those monikers and footnotes. This particular show at the beginning of 2025 was on at the same time I had lunch with art historian and professor Darius A. Spieth at LSU in late January where he proposed looking deeper into the life and career of Jorge Camacho as not only the last surrealist, but a thoughtful connector of generations that spanned fine art, politics, poetry and writing. He had me at last surrealist, but I was intrigued.

Writer and critic Zoé Valdés noted Camacho, too, as the “last of the great Latin American Surrealists,” and maybe it’s because it’s Halloween and the mood of the work feels both the gloaming light of the evening and the potential of dawn, Camacho does seems a little haunted. You could call the works landscapes, but of a particular place that was in the consciousness of Camacho as he navigated a life outside of Cuba and some impending terror of the emergence of technology and the 21st century. Spieth wrote in his essay on Camacho that, “Jorge Camacho’s choices of imagery deeply reflect the contradictions and frictions of the twentieth century, while he always remained faithful to the ideas of individual freedom and resistance to oppression, whether in the form of religion, police, or politics. At the same time, he was both a mystic and a defender of the Enlightenment.”

I have become more excited, and maybe this is a sign of my own age, by the increasing resurgence and care some galleries are giving to estates and late artist’s work. Many argued to me for years that it was perhaps a little bit of a cheat to focus on a “dead artist’s work,” because they aren’t there to truly oversee the presentation of their works in a commercial setting, but we have been doing these sorts of things in our world for hundreds of years. I think the actual dedication to reestablishing masters of their time, whether it be Camacho with Ghebaly, Geoffrey Holder with James Fuentes or the great Manoucher Yektai show at Karma that comes down this weekend, there is a lot to learn from how these artists’ navigated their own political eras and social turmoil as our current contemporary artists battle their own. —Evan Pricco

Subscribe and read Darius A. Spieth’s essay on Jorge Camacho from The Unibrow Issue 01 here