Portrait/ queer boys

"No child fits in a box, but if it has to go somewhere, then fit it in itself"

Jimmy- 2002

Only boys… project by Jimmy Groen
The silent architecture of a forbidden identity

In Only boys…, Jimmy Groen unfolds a world that is both intimate and elusive: a series of twenty-five pastel portraits of boys who do not exist, but who nevertheless bear a deeply personal truth. These boys are not models, not memories in the classical sense, but fragments of an identity that was not allowed to exist in childhood. They are the silent witnesses of a childhood in which gender was not experienced, but repressed; in which the self had to disintegrate in order to survive.

At first glance, the portraits seem soft, almost tender. But beneath that softness lies a charged tension. The boys look past us, as if in an in-between space—not quite here, not quite there. They are faces that exist on the edge of presence and absence, of memory and projection. In their gaze lies a form of dissociation that is unspoken, yet palpable in every line of pastel.

Groen uses pastel not only as a medium, but as a metaphor: vulnerable, direct, almost impervious to correction. The images seem to blur if you get too close. This fragility reflects the psychological reality of a child who had to hide, separate, and repress their gender identity. Seen in this light, the portraits are self-portraits without likeness—echos of an inner world that was never allowed to be visible.

Only Boys… thus places itself in a tradition of artists who use youth to depict inner worlds, but the project distinguishes itself through its focus on gender before language. Not the contemporary language of labels, visibility, or emancipation, but the prelingual experience of an identity that was not allowed to have a name. The boys in this series embody a queer history that is rarely told: that of the child who was not only different, but also not allowed to exist as themselves.

The exhibition invites the visitor not only to look, but to recognize. Groen asks us to connect the dots—not to reconstruct a story, but to experience what it is like when identity is not confirmed, but must be filled in. In this sense, the viewer becomes complicit in the process of meaning-making that was denied to the child at the time.

Only Boys… is not nostalgia, not a reconstruction of a lost youth. It is an act of reclamation. By drawing these boys, Jimmy Groen gives space to the parts of himself that were once meant to remain invisible. The pastel drawings show not only what was lost, but also what—despite everything—has endured.