FANTASIES OF THE CORDOBAN, NAVARRO
by Joaquin Santaella,
Writer and Journalist

From my days as a student until today I have been following the evolution in drawing and painting of Navarro's most cherished and strangest icons. It is like that lovable old caricature, referred to so often in Cordoba, that is but that suddenly also is not because, among other things, friends are leaving it/him, feeling themselves at risk.

From his palette surge grotesque visions: gnomes and little bears that are half- children meeting together with grown bears that are partly human, an elegant lady with paws of a wild beast seated on a sofa, dwarfs singing like little birds, two handsome eagles dressed as church prelates, in the background a highlands robber, horses, and a centaur. Gossiping neighbors in some angle of the picture, and always present a cave or animal den, and almost always, a ziggurat in the center.

After the initial surprise, we see a more realistic facet of Ignacio Navarro's work although a less amusing one, of ladies and gentlemen riding horseback, of insolent gypsies, of a large canine population, and a portrait of the artist with his dog, as examples. These images are considerably easier to understand, but they deliver a taste of the same kind of technical refinement as is contained in the fantastic element of this quite unique art.

Joaquin Santaella
Writer and Journalist

Tr. from the Spanish by Constance Ashton Myers
August 14, 2000
Columbia, SC, EE.UU.