My creative process is in part what I like to think of as a controlled randomness. Mixed media and collage has been the technique in which my thought has found form. Ideas entwine within the process and the conceptual use of materials. I’m rarely content with these objects. I often feel like my paintings are always a work in progress. It’s a strange logic. But if one is not challenged by the myth, then how does one evolve?
My recent work explores notions of beauty, time and nostalgias, with a strong concern on the cultural problems and the colonized status that the island of Puerto Rico must endure. These works are made mostly of paper mounted on canvas. That is old paper; old drawings, and paper that has been stained, and soiled by the mere process of producing art. They are a byproduct of all those innocent activities inside the studio, a diary of all the physical evidence of art making.
Text-base images and maps are part of the abstract language that creates form in the paintings. The work moves beyond abstraction without embracing figuration and/or representation of a traditional kind.
JOSE CAMACHO