Cándido Camacho · Bajo el signo del cuerpo
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Considered eccentric from the evolutionary centrality of art in the Canary Islands at the time, anachronistic or directly cursed, provocative and homoerotic, decadent and iconoclastic, the work of Cándido Camacho might well have been just an extravagant and ultimately doomed episode in Canary art in the late 20th Century, if it hadn’t become entangled along the way with some of the most important events, personalities, circumstances, intellectual and political concerns, adventures and cultural enterprises of that period on the Islands. In spite of the trials and tribulations that shaped his existence, the isolation of these islands, the fragility of a fascinating albeit controversial project that would call into question the conservation of his work on many occasions, his distance from trends, and doubts about the pertinence of his work, Camacho’s art gradually took shape and grew, driven by a fully humanistic postulate, the body, exacerbated, wounded, and transformed by sexual impulse, which Camacho accompanied on its journey towards spiritual and physical disintegration.
Carlos E. Pinto | Cándido Camacho · Biblioteca de Artistas Canarios nº49 (2010)
With the exhibition “Cándido Camacho: Under the sign of the body”, to mark the gallery’s 30th anniversary, Galería Artizar wishes to remember and revisit the work of Cándido Camacho (Tazacorte, 1951 – Madrid, 1992), since his first abstract series featured in this gallery’s inaugural exhibition that opened on 7 March 1989. But as we revisit his oeuvre, as we did with Ernesto Valcárcel in the exhibition Ab initio, we want to present his astonishing journey during the 1970s, when his work was first born, reconstructed and ascended from the sordid to the sublime in an unrepeatable and memorable pictorial experience.