El misterio del impulso Escarlata. Porexpan D30. 240 cm. diameter. |
Memories of Love. Installation. Variable dimensions. |
La Boule de neige. Vídeo. 11 minutes 51 seconds. Edition of 3. |
Teoría de todo/Teoría de nada. Photography and tracing paper. 185 x 177 each one. (diptych). Unique edition. |
Memories of Love. Photography. 200 x 240 cm. Edition of 3. |
Hole nº1 (for Adam). Frotage and compressed charcoal. Unique edition. |
The drawing, in terms of conceptual space that generates ideas, is the starting point for Juan Carlos Bracho in his first exhibition at the Galería Oliva Arauna. His intense, rigorous and innovative practice of this discipline starts from small repetitive gestures, and where one might expect stiffness and monotony Bracho surprise us with works a large sensory and evocative power; images and scenes that question us about our own look and in which we can find as much as we are willing to give.
The artist borrows from the history of thought the idea of eternal return and the cyclical view of the world. However, he leaves the drudgery associated with this concept (the repetition as a sentence exemplified in the character of Sisyphus) and he develops it from a much richer point of view, the world of ideas, creative processes and life as an evolution where everything comes back, is recycled, is changed, is enriched and it expands in an endless cycle.
In a montage where the different works seem to be projected one above another, drawing a narrative thread, the best symbols of that eternal return is a sphere, a perfect form and infinite seized with red crayons that as involved in flames receive us at the entrance of the gallery. El misterio del impulso escarlata –title of the work mentioned– ironically possess the accuracy and the presence of minimalist forms and metaphorical references to an imaginary landscape, hidden among thousands of lines of a draw and a shape without beginning or end.
And from a sphere to a large snowball. This is the boule de niege, the story of a failure, a video animation in which while we see some characters making patiently a big ball of snow, a voice over - the artist himself and a main character of the action - reflects from a frustrated experience on the transformative possibilities that ideas may have when they are put into practice, and the metamorphosis implicit in the whole critical thinking. From a dream and from a recreational and uninhibited perspective, Bracho makes an exercise of analysis and reflection of the processes, of the circularity of those and their own work.
A work that recovers physically with Memories of love; installation that is shown completed for the first time in this exhibition. In this new project, conceived as the closing of an entire cycles of both life and artistic, the topographic and the archaeological becomes historical cartography of a space –about to disappear– and memory of the artist's relationship with that place. A work done after the recovery of the markes that his actions have left their print on a wall between the years 2003-2010. With a total of 37 cubic meters, every inch of this area has been mapped rubbing 520 sheets of black carbon paper, and they are presented as a footprint and memory transferred from its visible surface.
El Eterno retorno (The Eternal Return) is completed with the diptych Teoría de Todo, Teoría de nada –work done directly on one of the walls of the gallery– and ends with the intervention project Hole No. 1 (for Adam), a drawing where Bracho totally abandoned the gesture transforming his drawing into dust.