Artist’s Statement

In my artistic practice, I explore visual fiction through the lenses of beauty, memory, time, and nostalgia. My work directly addresses the cultural complexities and colonial challenges enduring in Puerto Rico. This particular body of work investigates the relationship between text and image, questioning the gap between abstraction and figuration.

Graphite has been foundational to my practice since youth. My process begins by selecting text—often in Spanish, drawn from Puerto Rican literature and popular culture—and rendering it onto paper mounted on canvas. I use graphite to darken and transform the surface. As the piece evolves, I remove the canvas from its stretcher bars, placing it on the floor to collect and document random evidence of my creative process and studio activity. I purposefully obscure the readability of the text, prioritizing the formal and abstract nature of language. The final work forms a web-like composition, inviting viewers to reflect on its visual mantra and the sheer plasticity of the characters.

Canción de Invierno

This work is a composition of 20 pieces that meditates on displacement and shifting landscapes, tracing the transition from warm to cold, summer to winter. In the early 1990s, after graduating from Montclair State University and relocating my studio to Montclair, I began a series of works exploring the nature and physicality of ideas, materials, and the act of painting itself. Working outside the constraints of academia granted me a great deal of freedom, allowing me to begin creating my own personal mythology.

Canción de invierno bears the title of a song by Cuban composer Silvio Rodríguez. After moving from Puerto Rico in the late 1980s, music became a sanctuary that kept me connected to my culture and heritage. However, Rodríguez’s music became more than just a refuge; his lyrics and poetry offered profound lessons in art, romance, and creative expression. While living away from my homeland, La Isla, his work kept me focused and inspired, teaching me how to channel nostalgia and melancholy into art.

During this period, I developed a habit of photographically documenting my work-in-progress and its relationship to the workspace—treating the studio as a metaphor for the artistic process. Because mixed media and collage were the techniques where my thoughts naturally found form, integrating these photographs into my process felt like an organic evolution.

These pieces are not intended to directly represent or illustrate the song or poem. Instead, my approach is abstract, aiming to evoke the isolating, alchemical qualities of the creative journey.

José Camacho

About The Artist

José Camacho, born in Puerto Rico and based in New Jersey, has been a practicing professional artist since his graduation from Montclair State University in 1991. His work, comprised of a great variety of media, is layered with symbolism and traces the tension between physical matter and its meaning; memory and reinvention. It mirrors the duality of his life between two cultures, addressing rootedness and displacement, intuition and intellect. Camacho cites influences from artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francisco Oller, and Jasper Johns along with those of such poets as Silvio Rodriguez and Rainer Maria Rilke.