By Jesus Troncoso,
Writer and art critic
Doctor in the department of Philology and Fine Art
University of Seville

As a writer and art critic, it is an honor for me to write about the excellent impression I hold of the extensive work in art done by my friend, the painter and ceramicist don Ignacio Navarro Holgado.

Ignacio Navarro is a fine and creative Andalucian artist who, due to a profound and refined sensibility, has found his own unique artistic style through drawing. We can call it "fantastic realism." He shows the same talent for detail as the expressionists. In his work we see magic, forcefulness, and a richness of imagination rather like fairy tales written in poetry , like the Proustian search for the purest childhood dreams and, perhaps also childhood memories - many frustrated memories - from the realm of fantasy.

In Navarro-the-Cordoban's universe the fantastic, the poetic, the critical - as a medium of the anthropological and philosophical - serve as the warp through which are woven the technical elements of color, composition, drawing, and plastic material. These are then fused with his ancestral Califal and
Andalucian wisdom.

His experimentation with technique and process (oil, drawing, water color, engraving, painted ceramic, etc.), his psychology as tireless wanderer, his artistic subjectivity, his use of art as liberation, his never-failing vitality, the control over his work, and an ample intelligence constitute the characteristics of Navarro's painting. He is able to summon it all to the task in his creative (and experimental) moments.

J.T.

Tr. from the Spanish by Constance Ashton Myers, Aug. 14, 2000