By Daniel Gomez
Upon entering Hepburn Hall’s Lemmerman gallery, I was overcome with an immediate feeling of curiosity by the Puerto Rican iconography and cartographical elements in the work of Jose Camacho.
Camacho, who emigrated to New Jersey from his native Puerto Rico at the age of 19, is preoccupied with thematic elements of the island’s history that have perhaps been obscured by more publicized or universally relatable themes in recent years.
It is Camacho’s ability to bring important issues, such as the damaging effects of colonization on a nation’s collective identity to the forefront of his work that gives it such an air of importance. As Camacho puts it, “The work in this exhibition explores notions of beauty, time, and nostalgias, with a strong focus on the cultural problems and the colonized status that the island of Puerto Rico must endure.”
In the work featured in the collection, Camacho employs a stripped-down, honest approach to the depiction of Puerto Rican themes and social concerns that runs in stark contrast to the colorful, festive, and arguably safe manner in which the island is typically depicted in popular culture.
The undeniable dichotomy present in this comparison enables those of us who are unfamiliar with the island’s rich cultural history to begin to form an understanding of its roots as it is interpreted, and presented to us, from the perspective of one of its own.
For Camacho, the chosen iconography featured in the various pieces in this collection is representative of the socio-political ambiguity of present-day Puerto Rico. The piece entitled “Hold me in Paradise exemplifies this idea. Combing written word, collage, and photographs in a unifying format, Camacho alludes to the island’s 17th century African slave roots by surrounding photos of far-reaching cemeteries with overlapping lyrics taken from bombas, the expressive musical style created by slaves forced to work in Puerto Rico’s sugar cane fields. The use of lyrics from the bombas as well as the later plenas style in conjunction with the images of sweeping cemeteries serves to draw a dark parallel between the beauty of the imagery and its underlying significance when placed in a historical context.
Collectively, the work itself places most of the ideas out in the open for the viewer to interpret on their own. Camacho articulates this idea best in saying, “I consider myself an abstract painter, even though the work and the process are more conceptual visually. The reason being is perhaps because I like to concern myself with the formal rather than the subject matter. There is no hidden message.”