IGNACIO NAVARRO H. painter and ceramicist
By Rafael Cabrera
Decemver 6, 1996

INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN REALITY AND DESIRE
An attempt to encapsulate he work of Ignacio Navarro in words.

I met Ignacio Navarro twenty five years ago, when we had not yet begun to shave. We still had our youthful illusions, and we found unendurable the impositions that society, and especially a decadent middle class, placed on us. The decade of the seventies was just beginning and people had presentiments of profound change to come. That was also the time when the counterculture tried to offer some alternatives and postulated, besides a renewal of the return-to-nature ideals of Jean Jacques Rousseau, a change in the current culture, especially in its "pillars" most firmly-established in history and custom. The times they were a-changin', according to the message the troubadours of that era were giving us, as in Dylan's old song.

In any case, it was a time that gave birth to new values and new tools, under standards of the supposedly "New Culture." That was in fact true, because by virtue of a new spirit of freedom in the air, people did not hesitate to entertain Utopian visions such as the rejection of war; above all, there was the rise of the California hippie movement that later reached across to the European continent. We saw long-haired pacifists who proposed a revolution without bloodshed, a future of peace and happiness which, even so, was appropriated almost immediately by a system that knew how to co-opt and commercialize every one of these proposals, returning to their creators the "next move" in the form of hard drugs, marginality, and the Cold War. In the case of [the city of] Cordoba in those years, all this manifested itself in a new music and literature of which the youth took charge. As cases in point, we can cite Emerson, Like and Palmer, Jefferson Airplane, the Allman Brothers Band, Cat Stevens, or Joan Baez; and the books of Jack Kerouac and Alan Watts.

In this context occurred the beginnings. The gusto for drawing and a certain expressive need at the margin of education and the official culture cemented our friendship that, in spite of passing years and the rough tracks of life, still endures. Ignacio always surprises me with his facility for drawing, his love of animals that translates into neat sketches of horses in the English style showing his penchant for the fine and detailed continuous line. His first efforts with the brush already disobeyed the critics' rules and displayed his need to express the incongruence and hypocrisy in our immediate environment, both of which so painfully wound the most sensitive and nonconforming spirits.

A quarter of a century afterward, when all those proposals and utopias are already part of a still unfinished history , these grotesque and ironic figures have multiplied in his pictures, converted now into protagonists of an interior life that reminds us of the style of James Ensor in the flamboyant society of late nineteenth century Brussels. With a natural gift for expressionist representation charged with critical intent, Ignacio Navarro shares with the Belgian expressionist this vocation or need in which burlesque caricatured figures, fraught with psychological meaning, try to unveil (from behind social conventions) the real state of the souls of empty, obsolete beings. In spite of the apparent thematic implacability, his grammar is articulated with a considerable compassion, generating a discourse that suggests a certain redeeming pity, and an explanation that assigns blame. All is shown with a touch of humor. Thus Ignacio continues to experiment with a tricky, awkward theme.

I have cited in the first place the work of Ensor, similar to Ignacio in use of color and other treatment. Nevertheless, I should refer also to one of his clear antecedents in the world of Spanish painting, particularly Jose Guttierez Solana, a critical expressionist who knew how to capture, however painfully, the social reality of end-of-the-century Spain. In this sense, the work of Ignacio Navarro forcefully reopens the dictionary of the major symbols of the Spanish tragedy, its "intrahistory" so to speak. We see the figure of the Inquisitor next to the oblique gaze of the gluttonous, drunken clergyman; the horse, the bull; the historic forms of a Judeochristianity unconsciously assimilated, and the forms of those common locales and unavoidable references in the Spanish figurative tradition that seem to have been finished off completely with the last years of our century. Picasso, Rodriquez Luna in his early periperiod, and so many others.

Fantastic animals and monstrous hybrids that do not taktake us to surrealism as a Dali canvas might, imbued as it would be with psychoanalytic design (rather than opportunism), but to a sarcastic representation of the crudest reality, to the expression of its recurrence in a society that has been repeatedly characterized by resistance to change and to life as well.

Viewing the pictures of Ignacio intelligently, one sees in them no useless whimsy coming from a wild imagination. Rather, one confronts the pain that surges within when the stereotype, the mask, of social convention is stripped away, and when one confronts the being that, fortunately, still lives behind, hidden, waiting to be redeemed. The viewer has the sensation that one feels reading the last writings of a suicide. Stations of a unique Via Crucis (Way of the Cross), a salvation shared among distinct characters portrayed but never found localized in only one figure. The viewer must locate disperse fragments in the actors' twisted faces in a particular drama in order to divine the true intention behind the mask of social convention. And one must do this while separating the elements which the picture contains that are universal, elements we all share in common. "In all of us is a little of everything." We shelter everything in some corner of our being: the dictator and the leader, the innocent and the psychopath, the master and the slave.

Never was the labor of social criticism so easy. It is easiest when it is effected inside the heart, when it blossoms as a striving to reach an attainable utopia that almost never arrives. Thus, in many of Navarro's drawings appear, too, that idealized world in which Nature is portrayed as a grandiose and cosmic scenario where live luminous beings full of dignity, as shown in visions from our common memory, stories from history. Implicit we find a certain ancient cavalier ideal that is nevertheless not "classic" in the Mediterranean sense [Greek or Roman], although it shares some of the same symbols, but rather is medieval and Anglo-Saxon, we can even say Gothic.

The horse appears magnified in importance, and I'd dare to say "humanized," as an
expression of the ideal of beauty often denied through evidence of human imperfections that seem to negate the spiritual and rational aspects of mankind. On horseback, the cavalier is the animal's guide. He has been able to subjugate the beast, to put it at the service, now, of beauty, of representation in art.

And in the drawings we see clear reminiscences, explicit references to the past and to the childhood of the race. Beings of another time, perhaps timeless, that inhabit a perfectly dreamlike space, arranged according to the laws of these dreams that were forged at the same time as the personality, that "I" that cannot find itself and has to resort time and again to psychoanalysis, to juxtaposition of its inevitable contradictions: horse and rider, body and soul, reality and imagination -- all that said in a language through which shines both aesthetic and formal meaning.

We can say, then, that the work of Ignacio Navarro is, above all, the expression of an existential paradox, as is, in general, the life of every human being. On the one hand that which is and, on the other, that which should be. Reality and Desire. From the dynamic tension between both surges the work as language of the Creative Imagination, one life particularized, personal and unique. The reality should be, it seems to tell us, like that world where things are in their proper place, where forms and beings live in perfect harmony, exactly as in the righteous dream that, in this case, does not produce monsters but beautiful, perfect human beings. Additionally, all the above must be expressed in beautiful and elegant language, with a sweet and understandable style. The trouble is, Reality presents itself to us so differently. Nothing is where it should be. No face is truly beautiful, no expression ever is worthy of all; moreover, the language that articulates this is incongruent and vulgar, coarse, and detestable.

In the place of the Ideal Cavalier (expression of the harmonious human being), we see distinct masks of fear and shame, of limitations that the seven deadly sins place on one's

integrity, the inevitable limitations that form part of the human condition ever since humankind appeared on the Earth. In a certain sense, and returning to the Central European tradition, Ignacio's pictures recall to us don Bosco (the saint), and the way in which he showed us how we might be without sentiment and affirmation of life. In the work of Ignacio Navarro we can find a didactic and moralizing meaning, as if it were a mirror intentionally deformed such as might show us our own image, caricatured. Here we easily discover our weaknesses and contemplate our imperfection.

It is left to the viewer to accept or not to accept, to recognize or ignore, to see ourselves reflected in this looking glass or to continue on in the common restlessness of narcissism and self-complacency.

Rafael Cabrera.

Translated from the Spanish by Constance Ashton Myers Columbia, SC, EE.UU. August 10, 2000