Reyes Ferreira, Jesús “Chucho”

19th-20th Century Mexican

Jesús “Chucho” Reyes’ works usually trigger in the beholder a unique emotion akin to affection. Impossible to pigeonhole, the originality of this painter is grounded in a life based on a love of beauty, on his passion for the sacred, high and folk art of Mexico and other places, on hobbies like museography, books and interior design; on good taste and refinement.

Reyes embodies the self-taught artist who grew up in an environment that favoured the development of creative intuition. Born into a well-off family in Guadalajara, his father, Ventura Reyes y Zavala, a pedagogue and author of the book Las bellas artes en Jalisco (1882), took personal charge of his son’s home schooling. The young Jesús worked as packer in a chocolate factory, an apprentice in a printing house, a decorator for high society weddings and funeral wakes and as a window-dresser for the exclusive Casa Pellandini glassworks.

In 1938 he fled the puritan Guadalajara and moved to Mexico City. There he acquired a large house adjacent to Galería de Arte Mexicano, setting up an atelier in its courtyard where he began to experiment with materials. His compositions gradually grew more complex, lines being replaced by brushstrokes, and colours diversifying and acquiring new intensity. He made his own colour gouaches, blending vegetal pigments, shiny anilines, with boiling water and sometimes with calcium carbonate to achieve a craquelé effect on the paper support. In later works he incorporated gold and silver dust to reinforce the ornamentation, and also solid colours on cardboard or fine Chinese or Italian paper.

In 1945 Helena Rubinstein commissioned him with a major project, to decorate the company’s beauty salons. Reyes painted with heart and soul, changed his subject matters, thickened his brushstroke and expanded his palette. He drew and coloured dolls, roosters with golden tails and crests, birds, horses, archangels, devils, figures of Christ, clowns, Adams and Eves, skeletons, nudes, bouquets of flowers and still lifes.

An aesthete and a dandy, for decades he donned the mantle of an amateur artist, neither signing nor dating his works, and only at the age of fifty did he begin to exhibit in galleries and museums. And it was also around this time when his collaboration with the architect Luis Barragán was made known, in the project for the residential area of El Pedregal and Torres de Ciudad Satélite, in which Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990) was also involved. The light filtering through lattices, screens, choir lecterns, stairs with no handrails, glazed spheres and, very especially, yellow or pink walls, could well be attributed to Reyes’ input. An arbiter of good taste, Reyes reappraised Mexico’s artistic tradition regardless of era, origin and commercial value.

Jesús "Chucho" Reyes Ferreira