Jesús "Chucho" Reyes Ferreira

(Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1882 – Mexico City, 1977)

Girl with Buns

n.d.

gouache on cardboard

97.5 x 70.5 cm

Inv. no. CAB121

BBVA Collection Mexico



The prolific artistic output of Jesús “Chucho” Reyes Ferreira can be divided into two phases: one corresponding to the Tapatio period (demonym of the city of Guadalajara), defined by a puerile and deliberately elliptical drawing; and a second period covering the work created between 1938 and 1977 in Mexico City, a time when Reyes consolidated his technical and expressive skills. In short, his naivety and treatment of colour derive from regional folk traditions, nineteenth-century anonymous portraits (particularly the dead-girls genre), the paraphernalia of travelling fairs, wooden carvings from provincial churches and simple handcrafted toys.

In this painting, a figure is boldly placed at the centre of the image in a frontal composition. The brushwork does not linger in details or technical grandstanding: the patterns of festooned lines are applied both to the dress and to the backdrop; the scrolled specks suggest the buns of the hairdo; the rotund and sometimes charmingly dishevelled outline traces the silhouette of the doll. But this Girl with Buns, apart from the cluttered combination of straight lines, circles and spirals, brings to mind the alphabet of basic Mexican forms that Adolfo Best Maugard (1891-1964) listed in the 1920s in his Método de dibujo, a drawing method conceived for public schools in the post-revolutionary era. The explosive pink, indigo, purple, cadmium yellow, ochre palette is characteristic of the spontaneous small-town baroque style.

The self-confident brushwork speaking of a well-trained hand, the unmistakable palette, the uninhibited cohesion of disparate visual sources, the spontaneous fusion of pre-Hispanic, colonial and modern influences, blend folk and handcraft qualities gracefully and with exquisite candour, overcoming the prejudices that restrain aesthetic pleasure and constrain the canonical values of visual art.