Ignacio Navarro
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Ignacio Navarro, like all genuine artists, builds his syntax taking his experience as point of departure. Experience that, in this case, is that of the lonely sailor surviving a spiritual death and whose need for expression originates in the deep inquisition practised upon his soul by the different institutions: the Church, the State, the Capital, the jet-set... Just one allegory, always the same one, reproducing itself unceasingly, as a thousand-headed Hydra, in a stage where death and resurrection turn up in an auto-da-fé, in a programmed image of the Last Judgement, as in the Apocalypse by Beato de Liébana. But beyond that sorrowful carnival- as in Ensor- there appears the mere need for expression, as an elixir which gives health, purity and renders the artist´s tortured soul to its original state.
Maybe behind all that iconography- that deliberate and inevitable use of "those mayor symbols of the Spanish tragedy", that criticism of the Establishment, so sympathetic and merciless at the same time- there exists a profound need for transcendence, for a spritualism always denied, time after time, by glances and silence.. It thus makes sense the expresion of the mask trying to conceal an unholy countenance, ashamed of its own miseries, of his telling wrinkles and the inefficiency of the make-up, a countenance reduced to the ashes of expression. It is then most becoming the grim which asks and, at the same time, shows the horror which takes in the heart of the churches, the souls of the faithful stripped off the sacred, spirituality and beauty. All uncovering, all description implies a commitment with what we hold to be true and real. For that reason, the implicit moral criticism in the figures that constitute Ignacio´s allegory is born of the need for building and creating a space where the soul may transcend, free from the tyranny of those expressions which coerce and aggress it unremittingly. The sense of that uncovering has also to do with an inner purification. The pure and free of conditions human being, who is aware of the good that goes along being in control of his own destiny, rebels against the coertion that the instituions and the powers try to impose upon him by means of expressions, words and ideas. And he claims as of right, free expression, inspiration, the actual moment which is taking place. The artist, in this case, wants above all to live in the real world and for that reason exorcises the ghosts that attempt to avoid it by invading his conscience and affecting his sensibility. It is for that reason that he needs to reject them in an act of creation, exorcise them with vigorous lines and brush-storkes telling what words cannot suggest. |
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