“Implosion is the process by which objects are destroyed collapsing upon themselves, concentrating matter and energy”.
Invited by the Hammerson’s Emerging Artist Initiatitive, artist Adrian Navarro presents his second solo show in London, “Implosion”, a series of works combining painting and screen-printing on canvas, the outcome of a process which also involves installation, photography and the digital post-production of images.
Navarro’s work configures a visual exploration of space through rhythm, movement and energy fields. His creative processes seek to expand the vocabulary of the visual arts, investigating new mechanisms of intervention in the pictorial medium, which include tools borrowed from architecture. The process in “Implosion” is based on a spatial investigation whose first step is the creation of a real physical model of human scale, composed of a series of three-dimensional webs whereby cloths of multiple colours and patterns intersect in space. Adrian Navarro’s eye travels across the installation following its movements which he will later deconstruct into series of photographic stills. By manipulating and shifting these images on the canvas, an implosive structure is created.
This new series of works describe spaces inhabited by emerging figures trapped in virtual webs from which they can only be set free through the eye of the observer. Adrian Navarro pursues a personal investigation into the perception of space that is constructed through superimposed layers in constant transformation, developing depth in the painting by means of a projected perspective. In the paintings at “Implosion”, this space has just collapsed inwards provoking multi-directional deformations due to the internal tension between the elements. Works such as “Interzone” (2009) or “Mercury” (2009) generate a dynamic perspective whereby the spectator’s visual field is drawn in by the depth of the painting and a subjective landscape is reconstructed in the observer’s innermost eye.
In the series “Spheres”, the skin which encapsulates these implosions becomes visible, like a surface containing organic forms which float in weightlessness. The circular experience of the gaze is frozen and, from an insurmountable distance, the spectator observes the figures trapped within. In “Sphere 01”, Adrian Navarro’s obsession in capturing light converts it into a fully tangible and physical element which at the same time emerges and is absorbed by the gravity at the centre of the sphere, attracting all that surrounds it. Once the critical state of the implosion has been overcome, nothing escapes this silent collapse.
Adrián Navarro (Boston, 1973) is a visual artist currently living and working in London. In 2001, Adrian began his art practice in New York after graduating from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, School of Architecture. Since 2006, he has established himself in London where he completed his art studies at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design (2007-2008). He has participated in a number of solo and group exhibitions in both cities. His work can be found in collections such as that of the UBS Bank and the Caja Madrid.
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