Until May 18, the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York presents the exhibition FETISH: Photographs by Jorge Alberto Cadi, Le Fétichiste and Miroslav Tichý. Produced in collaboration with the Christian Berst Art Brut gallery, this exhibition will highlight vernacular photography.
In the streets of Havana, Jorge Alberto Cadi (1963 – , Cuba) is known only as “El Buzo” – the diver -, constantly looking for material for his works, in the city’s abandoned objects. Boltanskian in his memorial use of photography, Warholian when he stitches bits of images together, Cadi seeks above all to reveal what the images hide. Exhibited for the very first time in 2019 by the gallery, then in 2022 at Paris Photo, it 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 Botanique, in Brussels. His work is notably part of the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art (Pompidou). In 2023, it was exhibited by Sophie Calle at the Picasso Museum.
Le Fétichiste – It is the story of an anonymous photographic group emerging from the secrecy to which it seemed doomed. That is, hundreds of amateur prints running over a decade, between 1996 and 2006, and testifying to the fetishism of its author. This is manifested through photos of legs covered in tights, taken indifferently in the street or on television. The practice evokes that of Miroslav Tichý, with the difference that our author sometimes becomes an actor himself. In both cases as frequently in outsider art burning questions arise about the artification with which our gaze proceeds and the share of collective imagination which would infuse such individual mythology.
Trained in academic painting, Miroslav Tichý (1926 – 2011, Czech Republic) did not secretly devote himself to photography until 1970. Obsessive, not to say fetishistic, he photographed women surreptitiously with the device he made for himself. His blurred photos, sometimes enhanced with a pen on the border, are part of an immutable process, to which he adhered until the 1990s. Discovered by Roman Buxbaum, he was very quickly supported by Harald Szeemann. In 2005, he received the discovery prize at the Rencontres d’Arles and, 3 years before his death, was given a major retrospective at the Center Pompidou. In 2019, it was presented again in Arles in the event exhibition: Photo brut.
FETISH
Photographs by Jorge Alberto Cadi, Le Fétichiste, and Miroslav Tichý
In partnership with Christian Berst Art Brut
Until May 18, 2024
Ricco/Maresca Gallery
529 W 20th St.
New York, NY 10011
www.riccomaresca.com
Christian Berst Art Brut
3-5 passage des Gravilliers
75003 Paris
www.christianberst.com
