Artist: Iñigo Navarro
Dates: January 27th 2024 to March 09th 2024

“In 1997 the black, convertible Golf GTI, with its 120 horsepower, was a status symbol. People called it “la tumba de los pijos” (the toffs’ tomb) due to the cocktail of powerful acceleration, hefty price tag and high accident rate. At the time we all thought it was the gateway to Valhalla.​

Horsepower is a unit of measurement of power adopted in the late 18th century by the Scottish engineer James Watt. He proposed this unit to compare the output of steam engines with the power of draft horses. After several experiments, Watt estimated that a horse could lift one hundred and twenty kilos thirty metres in one minute. He worked this out by means of an ingenious pulley mechanism on one of the docks in Dublin harbour.​

Just at the point where Madrid dissolves into a thing called the periphery, there is a sun-drenched plot of land which still contains a stretch of stony ground, fenced in by weeds and beer cans. It was here where, in the beautiful spring of ’97, a little girl found herself spontaneously levitated by the grace of God, exerting a force equivalent to half a horsepower. God chose her because she was full of good karma and had made something of herself, despite coming from a dysfunctional family. Blessed are the children of drug addicts for one day they will sit in a VIP box at Real Madrid Football Stadium.​

When the girl, exuding a scent of roses redolent of the air fresheners sold in Zara Home, regained her composure and began to make sense of what had just happened to her, she came up against the existential drama of the event.​

A horse, being the only witness, would have to testify that it had really happened. Unfortunately, the great virtues of horses do not include the capacity for abstraction, taking it for granted as they do that, when little girls are levitated by God at the divine rate of half a horsepower, this is part of natural law and not a miracle in any sense of the word.​

Thus, in this place and in this manner, before anyone would believe what had happened to her, she would first have to explain the joke to the horse and then the horse would have to speak.​

In other words, a miracle within a miracle, within a miracle.”

– Iñigo Navarro, Madrid, January 2024 –

The art of Iñigo Navarro (Madrid-Spain, 1977) is a reflection on experience and memory, which is embodied in each of his creations. As a figurative artist, Navarro seeks to capture the essence of what is real and tangible, but also what is intangible, what we feel and experience in each moment.

Navarro takes a performative approach, meaning that his work is generated through action; through his own direct intervention in the creative process. In this way, his work is an imprint of his experience and his presence in the world. This imprint is manifested in every brushstroke, in every line, in all the textures of his works.

Navarro’s work also contains a philosophical element, as he seeks to investigate the nature of experience and the relationship between humans and the world around them. In this sense, his art becomes a tool for exploring the limits of knowledge, truth and perception.

Navarro’s influences are diverse and wide-ranging, encompassing everything from the literature of authors such as Fante, Gonzo, Bukowski, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Delillo, to the cinema of Tarkovsky and the paintings of Velázquez and Rivera. His works reflect these influences in various ways, whether in their subject matter, technique or style.

Another of the fundamental elements in Navarro’s work is the creative process itself. As an artist, he shows a clear interest in the journey, in the process of creation, which becomes an experience in itself. His art is a process of discovery, exploration and experimentation, which materialises in each work.

Thus, although at the beginning of his career he was interested in techniques such as video and photography, he reached a point where he realised he needed to formalise the emotion he felt during the process of painting, in Navarro’s words “the definitive medium”. In this sense, his work is linked to the tradition of painting from the Spanish Golden Age, which was characterised by, but not limited to, the representation of reality.

Finally, Navarro’s art seeks to escape from the conceptual space, from preconceived ideas and stereotypes, exploring a new territory between conceptualism and formalism, between playfulness and pessimism. His work is a constant search for the tension between these elements, which makes it a unique and impactful experience for the viewer. In short, Iñigo Navarro’s work is an invitation to explore the human experience from an artistic and philosophical perspective, through the medium of figures and images.