ADRIAN NAVARRO
Ring Cycle
24 March to 9 May 2011
Opening Thursday 24 March 2011 ay eight p.m.
Following on from its passage through the Hammerson Art Space in London, Pilar Serra presents the Ring Cycle, the latest project from Adrian Navarro with which his painting strengthens itself along those lines that are so much his of establishing connections and distensions among the pictorial medium, reality, architecture and perception.
How to confine reality –sensorial and formal– to a space as clearly demarcated as is the canvas without losing its freshness and freedom, is one of the great challenges among those that have accompanied –and still accompany– painting since its origins. And in this enterprise is to be found Adrian Navarro (Boston, 1973. Living and working in London) which with his pictorial work traces a line of creative investigation which delves both into the systems of perception of the image and into the mechanisms of construction and symbolic representation of the existing –understood in all its volumetric, expressive and visual complexity– and therefore with the wish to show these universal contradictions in which the human being, society, the environment and actual pictorial language find themselves enveloped.
If, on the one hand, Navarro’s pictures cry out their two-dimensionality, then on the other they show themselves as a window to a piece of weightless space, to a virtual and illusory landscape where geometric volumes demonstrate their time and three-dimensionality in a rhythmic, musical floating. This very direct relation of his works with space, this sensation they give off of being able to be passed through, has a clear relation with the artist’s architectural training, with the most intimate function of that discipline, that of creating habitable spaces.
Also the matter, the pigment, contained by those rings on the point of exploding seems to symbolize the pulsation of life which tensely plays with untying itself from the oppressive, a metaphor perhaps of the everyday reality of contemporary man. He said this recently: “Man is an alienated being who thinks he is free. The same thing happens with painting, it is a free and expressive medium whose aim is the communication of a view of the world, where that freedom is not possible. This is the paradox I try to represent”. Navarro’s work explores the dichotomy between physical confinement and expansive freedom inherent to organic painting and, by extension, to the human being.
Navarro commenced his artistic activity in New York in 2001 after qualifying as an architect in Madrid. Since 2006 he has been based in London where he completed his artistic studies at the Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design. He has taken part in several individual and collective exhibitions and his work can be found in collections such as UBS Bank, Circa XX (Pilar Citoler Collection) or Caja Madrid.
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