MADRID REPORT

LUIS E. CAMEJO
City in Motion
Blurring the boundaries between the virtual and the real

Beautifully situated opposite the Retiro Park on Alfonso XII, the Godoy World Art Gallery opened a little over a year ago. Its aims are to provide a platform for young, talented and innovative artists and to provide the public with a broad and inspirational array of works. In the past year they have put together a number of exhibits, one of their most recent being ‘Ciudad Movil’ (City in Motion) by the Cuban born Luis E. Camejo. Although Camejo has exhibited in the USA, Holland, Switzerland and Cuba, this was his first solo exhibition in Spain.
Camejo’s works though clearly paintings are simultaneously very photographic and initially, one is under the impression that he has either painted over or has projected a photograph onto the canvas. In actual fact neither technique is used and what appear to be scenes of captured reality, on closer viewing, turn into vignettes of surreality. Working from photographs taken around his familiar surroundings in La Havana, Cuba, he creates dynamic glimpses of a world seemingly frozen in time. The Cuban cityscape with its Fifties car models enhance this feeling of peering into a time that has been and yet still vibrates with present movement.

Working through reduction
Camejo described his technique of working in oils. Beginning with a very fluid paint, almost water-like, he covers the entire canvas. He sees the liquidity of the paint in itself, as an allegory for the fluid impermanence of the human state. Working in a single tone he reduces the paint with a turpentine soaked cloth to create the broader forms. Instead of adding tones and layers, Camejo works through subtraction. Using white, he then creates the details. Often, he throws turpentine directly onto the canvas creating runs in the paint surface, leaving many of the paintings looking rain drenched or icily congealed.

Having previously worked with a broader palette, Camejo discovered that a single tone offset with white created a stronger and more radical effect. Many of the oils in this current series hark of blue in various hues, some strong and vibrant, others paler and more washed out. Camejo is interested in and has researched the psychology of colours and this group of works inspires a gentle sense of melancholy. Another group of the oils is dominated by an interesting dusky red infused with pink. Of the aquarelles, a medium Camejo states he enjoys working in due to its demand for one continuous mode of creation, there is one of the Malecon, the wave drenched corniche in La Havana, a recurring depiction throughout his previous works.

Reflection or reality
Fluid and frozen, water-washed and oscillating static, Camejo’s works blur the boundaries of steadfast dichotomy. It is not clear whether the represented spaces are public or private, exterior or interior, a reflection or reality. For example, in a few of the exhibited works, the glass windows of a corridor walkway reflect and represent a greater life and detail than the scenes supposedly reflected. On closer inspection it is not clear whether it is a corridor or whether the windows are reflections or actually another world in operation. Cities within cities, life in its multiple worlds; the collective urban and individual perception are refracted in his work.

His human forms rarely look directly out of the canvas. They are silhouettes, generally with their backs to us, reflected in a window or themselves looking into a window or mirror considering themselves despite, such as in one work, casting no reflection themselves. The anonymity of his human forms is integral to the allegory of his work. Compared to the human form, the city is predominant, for Camejo says, in an age where forces such as those of globalisation dominate; the individual identity is becoming increasingly more effaced.

The city – a conglomeration of perceptions
Yet the city is also challenged in his work, nothing is viewed to be solid and little is as it seems. The city functions as a metaphor for his dreamlike interplay of the virtual and the real. The people within it are under the influence of these forces and we, the viewer, by association are also brought into question. The theme of perception is tantamount and many different realms, including our own, operate within his work. None of the works in this exhibition are titled, for although each work can stand alone, Camejo sees them as contributing to the whole of which they are a part. Another reason is that Camejo does not wish to lead the viewer toward any particular understanding or guided appreciation, but to let each perceive without any prompting. Coming from Cuba, one wonders whether his work has any political undertones. Camejo states that it does not. He sees himself as completely apolitical and any commentary inferred is one about the general human condition and its environment.
To find out more about Luis E. Camejo and to view a large selection of his works: www.camejoart.com

For more about upcoming and previous exhibitions at the Godoy World Art Gallery or to view ‘Ciudad Movil’ online: www.godoyworldart.com