Jucambe

Born in Cuba as a descendant of formerly enslaved people from Senegal and the Congo, Cárdenas moved from Havana to France in 1955 and, at the invitation of André Breton, joined the Surrealist group in Paris. His encounter with West African culture through Pan-Africanist circles there transformed his work and provided inspiration for his dynamic, totemic sculptures that fall between abstraction and figuration. Breton saw magic in the sculptor’s hands that he described as clever "as a dragonfly."[1] For Cárdenas, Surrealism offered artistic freedom and personal rediscovery. "In Paris," he said, "I discovered what a man is…what African culture is...what a Black man is."[2] Directly carved and shaped from wood, Jucambe draws on the visual traditions of international modernism, African art, and Cuban Santería.

[1] André Breton, Cárdenas: Sculpture, dessins. Exh. cat. Paris: Galerie la Cour d’Ingres, 1959, unpaginated.

[2] Quoted in José Pierre, La Sculpture de Cárdenas, Brussels, 1971, p. 11.