HILARIO BRAVO (Cáceres, 1955)."Perpetual door I".Mixed media on canvas.Signed on the back.Measurements: 130 x 65 cm.Hilario Bravo was born in Cáceres in 1955. For family reasons the painter spent his childhood and the years of his adolescence in San Sebastián, where his artistic circles influenced his way of understanding art, although he was always a self-taught painter who preferred to confront artistic and plastic activity individually. In 1972 he presented his first individual exhibition, and that same year he also attended the Pamplona meetings. At that time he was attracted to the conceptualist aspects of art, and even carried out a happening. During those years, one of the decisive readings for his iconic-plastic training was Father Barandiarán's Basque Mythology. In 1975, an exhibition by the painter held in the Basque Country was censored because it was considered that it did not follow the basic rules of respect for the public and social system.Despite these first incursions into action art, the artist soon began to transfer his concerns to the purely plastic plane, with pictorial art predominating as his most suitable mode of expression.Hilario Bravo's work is inscribed between the limits of figuration and abstraction; it is situated in the space of the "between", in the intermediate between being and nothingness, in order to rethink and re-paint the enigmatic appearance of things. His painting cannot be classified within the figurative line, nor, despite its simplicity and plastic simplicity, within minimalist abstractionism. Rather, his work could be described as painting of signs, symbols and poetic gestures that appear weakened as they are inscribed in the poetic side of the world.He has participated in numerous local and regional exhibitions, as well as in others outside the region: the Arco Fair in 1990, and others in Seville, Valencia, Barcelona, Lisbon and Mexico. As we have already suggested, he is also an engraver, and won the VI National Engraving Prize at the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Engraving in Marbella (1999), with his work "Escalera Interior".His work is presented today as that of a mature painter, consolidated in the art world, with the approval and favour of art historians, specialists, critics and intellectuals.