Julio Carrasco Bretón

Biography

In August 2023 a large mural by Julio Carrasco Bretón was unveiled in the immigration area of Ben Gurion Airport. The commission came from the Mexican-Israeli philanthropist Isaac Assa. For an artist who lives in Paris and works in several countries, it is one of the most conspicuous of his recent works.

He was born in 1950 in Mexico.

Carrasco did not begin in an art school. He studied chemical engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and graduated with honours in 1975. He studied painting with Lino Picaseno at the National School of Plastic Arts. In 1977 he began work toward a master’s degree in the philosophy of science. He later taught art, philosophy and chemistry at UNAM. His first mural dates from 1973, the year his work was first shown publicly, at a group exhibition at Galería Yoca. His first solo exhibition followed in 1977. In 1976 he designed a major stage set for the Teatro El Granero, for a production of a play by Fernando Arrabal.

Since 1973 he has painted more than fifty murals (by other accounts about seventy-five) at universities, government buildings, cultural institutions and private companies in Mexico, France, Spain, Costa Rica, Canada and the United States. The best known are in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies: “Ecotropic Symphony” (1997) and a work connected with President Adolfo López Mateos at the Plaza Legislativa. There are murals in the city government building in Monterrey and in the National Academy of Art in Sofia. In the lobby of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva hangs “The Epic of the Intellect”.

His main invention is technical. He patented a method he called “isoplastica”: the panels are made from a mixture of silicone and pulverised marble. They are prepared in his studio, then rolled or stacked and sent to the site. For this reason he called such works “murals in taco” (“murales en taco”). On arrival, a panel mural can be assembled in about eight hours. One of the portable murals, devoted to the Battle of Puebla, travelled around the state of Puebla.

The themes of his murals follow his education: ecological problems, mythology, social movements, history, the effects of technology on society. “Perfume”, for the Plaza Lancaster Hotel in Toluca, tells the history of perfume-making. By different counts he has made between 900 and 1,200 canvases, usually of medium size. Erotic and literary subjects are common in them, along with dance, cinema, theatre and poetry, and a female figure often appears. Surrealist influence is visible in his painting; since 2000 his work has become more abstract and geometric, with strong colours. He describes himself as an admirer of the methods of David Alfaro Siqueiros, especially his use of multiple viewing angles. Since the 2000s he has made lithographs at the Atelier Bramsen in Paris and engravings at Mario Reyes’s workshop in Mexico City.

He has held more than sixty solo exhibitions and has taken part in more than 150 group shows in nineteen countries. He says that his work should be independent, and for that reason he has never been an artist in residence at any public or private institution.

A separate strand of his career concerns artists’ rights. He took part in founding the Sociedad de Artistas Lúdicos (the Society of Playful Artists), the Mexican Society of Visual Artists, SOMART (1980), the World Council of Visual Artists (1989) and the Academy of Natural Sciences (1993). From 2001 to 2006 he headed SOMAAP, the Mexican copyright society for visual artists (by other accounts, from 2000), and from 2005 to 2009 he was president of the International Council of Creators of Graphic, Plastic and Photographic Arts within CISAC, the international confederation of authors’ societies. He is a member of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, has given more than seventy talks on culture and copyright in Latin America, the United States, Spain, France, Canada, the United Kingdom and Italy, has written for newspapers and magazines and has taken part in radio programmes.