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Juan Carlos Bracho_ I.E.S. Reino Aftasí_Hidden Youth_23/01_10/03/26_dossier

“Don’t go outside the lines,” “the trunk should be brown and the crown green,” “that doesn’t go there,” “be careful to do a clean job, without stains,” etc. These phrases are common in “art education” or “visual arts” classes in primary and secondary schools, even today. Art education, at all educational levels, rarely moves away from training based on copying from life and on the Renaissance ideal of beauty defined by Vasari as a return to classical order, the faithful representation of reality and nature, and, of course, adherence to rules and human proportions—so iconically represented by Leonardo da Vinci in his Vitruvian Man (the anthropocentrism that places humankind as the measure of all things and the center of the universe).

In a gesture of desacralizing art and a firm commitment to its playful and educational dimension, Juan Carlos Bracho seeks to break away from what is normative in drawing. Bracho does not understand this discipline as a technique or as a formal result, but rather as a tool for thought and action. For this reason, he frequently integrates educational proposals into his projects through participatory, cross-disciplinary learning experiences.

In Hidden Youth, his fourth solo exhibition at Galería Ángeles Baños, this attitude translates into a collective work that blurs the boundaries between authorship, process, and final result. The project is structured around a mural intervention composed of sixteen large-format circles executed in situ. Although identical in size, their shapes and colors are varied and kindred, like the young participants who created them, and they are arranged to generate a dynamic, immersive composition that transforms the perception of the space that contains them. Frottage further reinforces the idea of revelation, as the drawing emerges through action, contact, and wear, making visible what had previously remained hidden.

Each circle was created by several of the students who took part in the workshop Drawing Exercises, developed by the artist over several sessions at I.E.S. Reino Aftasí—sessions conceived as both a theoretical and practical activity through which to reflect collectively on the act of drawing. Because what does it mean to draw? What is the meaning of “drawing well” and “drawing badly”? How can we learn to undraw?

Thus, drawing ceases to be a test of skill and becomes a shared space for experimentation and learning, where the notion of ability and the hierarchy between artist and participants dissolve; a practice accessible to anyone, regardless of their dexterity or prior experience.

Hidden Youth, the latest of these exercises, leaves the blank sheet of paper and reaches the walls, breaking established rules and occupying the exhibition space with a risky and courageous conceptual proposal, despite being situated within a commercial gallery and an academic educational context. Ultimately, it does not fear the unknown, the strange, or even what may initially seem frightening.

The intervention ultimately redraws the architecture of the gallery, where geometric structures function as a metaphor for human relationships, as the distances, intersections, and tangencies between the circles evoke emotional and social bonds: a kind of cosmography of celestial bodies that rise and fall, draw closer and move apart in an infinite circular motion.

But the viewer moving through the gallery can broaden their gaze and discover multiple references: from Leonardo’s famous drawing of the human body inscribed within a circle and a square, to the geometric forms of the European avant-gardes of the first half of the twentieth century; from primitive pictographs and petrogliffs created millions of years ago using simple geometries, to children’s activity books designed for coloring, cutting, or pasting; from the quick, fleeting drawings on classroom chalkboards, to schematic graffiti, tags, and markings on dimly lit streets; from the new worlds revealed by technological advances (the vision of a vast, complex, non-geocentric universe through the telescope, or tiny subworlds invisible to the naked eye through the microscope), to unseen worlds that exist only in the imagination.

Hidden Youth does not propose a closed work or an object for contemplation, but rather a shared situation that unfolds in time, space, and in the relationship between those who make it possible and those who experience it, inseparably integrating the pedagogical, the playful, and the artistic.

Javier Martín-Jiménez

 
 

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