DISCOVERIES FROM THE DEEP

First published: Autumn 2024

Cuban artist El Buzo dives through trash, navigates darkness and light, then cuts, scrapes and sews, to create his art

The nickname of Jorge Alberto Hernández Cadi – “El Buzo” (“the diver”) – recalls the Fool’s line from the Shakespeare play King Lear: “Frateretto calls me and tells me Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness”. Cadi is a deep diver in this lake. His unsettling work, based on found photographs that he alters aggressively, reveals an inner vision of good and evil in which the most ordinary and innocent surface can open up to reveal demonic undercurrents.

Untitled, 2019, collage with sewn thread on photograph, 8.5 x 11 in. / 22 x 28 cm

Cadi is one of the most prominent artists represented in the collection of NAEMI (National Art Exhibitions by the Mentally Ill), which was founded in 1989 by Cuban-American curator and collector Juan Martín. The collection is oriented toward outsider artists from Cuba and the Cuban diaspora, particularly in Florida and the American south, with the aim of introducing their work to the wider world as well as their home country. Martín met Cadi through Cuban psychologist, Pablo H Rodríguez Mesa, who has investigated the creative process in people with mental illness.

Untitled, 2024, collage with sewn thread on photograph, 7 x 9.5 in. / 18 x 24 cm

Cadi was born in Havana in 1964, years after the Revolution had brought Fidel Castro to power but during a period that was fraught with tension, as the USA and the former Soviet Union faced off against each other with the island as a strategic focal point. When Cadi was 27, he suffered from depression intense enough to push him to attempt to take his own life. He says that a cause was his relationship with his older brother, who was schizophrenic and had become dangerously aggressive: “It marked me forever. I had a feeling there was no reason to go on living.”