jorge alberto cadi
black matter
Scarred faces, dismembered bodies, scars and crosses everywhere: Cadi’s horrific world is populated by mutant beings. Like a sorcerer’s apprentice, each individual photographed has undergone a metamorphosis at his hands to reveal what was hidden. For Cadi, reality lies and images are merely reflections of this lie.
Excluded, bullied, and often mocked, he grew up in Havana in a violent and cruel family environment. Since childhood, he has taken refuge in art, where he gives free rein to his schizophrenia. In his obsessively composed photomontages, he lets his existential rage explode. Each collage is a kind of duel in which he settles scores with everyone.
His sensitive gaze seeks to decode society’s representations in order to reveal their intrinsic violence, hidden evil, and unmentionable desires. He sees everything, like a hallucinating medium. Before his eyes, photographs become sensitive plates that reveal human secrets, the hypocrisy of human relationships, and society’s confinement within conventions that he abhors.
His photomontages embody the dialogue he desperately tries to create with the outside world, a world filled with ghosts, fear, and burning desires.
Sébastien Lifshitz, curator
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.