FETISH: Photographs by Jorge Alberto Cadi, Le Fétichiste and Miroslav Tichý

Trained in academic painting, Tichý secretly engaged in photography only in 1970. Obsessive, if not fetishistic, he photographs women surreptitiously with the camera he built. His blurry photographs, sometimes enhanced with a pen border, are part of an immutable process, to which he adhered until the 1990s. Discovered by Roman Buxbaum, he was soon supported by Harald Szeemann. In 2005, he received the discovery prize at the Rencontres d’Arles and was given a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou three years before his death. In 2019, he is again presented in Arles for the exhibition event, Photo brut.

In the streets of Havana, everyone knows Jorge Alberto Cadi as « El Buzo » - the diver - because he’s constantly searching material for his works in the city’s abandoned objects. Boltanskian by his memorial use of photography, Warholian by his taste for stitching images together, Cadi always seeks to reveal what these photographs are hiding. Exhibited for the very first time in 2019 by the gallery, then in 2022 at Paris Photo, he was presented the same year in the 2nd part of Photo brut which, after the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles, was hosted at the Centrale and the Botanique, in Brussels. His work is included in the collections of the Musée national d’Art moderne (Pompidou). In 2023, he was exhibited by Sophie Calle at the Musée Picasso.

This is the story of an anonymous photographic collection that surfaced from the secret depths to which it seemed doomed. Hundreds of amateur prints created over the course of a decade, between 1996 and 2006, that bear witness to the fetishistic habits of its author, manifested through pictures of legs covered with tights, taken either in the street or from a television screen. His practice evokes that of Miroslav Tichý, with the principal difference that our photographer sometimes becomes a subject himself. In both cases—as is often true with art brut—are the burning questions of the construction to which our gaze proceeds and of the collective imagination’s role in this individual[…]