Iván Navarro builds chairs that aren’t meant for sitting and doorways you can’t walk through. Armed with fluorescent and neon lights and mirrors, he hijacks everyday objects or architectural fixtures like ladders, tables, doors, fences and water towers and imbues them with metaphorical meanings critiquing systems of power, authority and surveillance. Comprising multicolored fluorescent tubes, his “Red and Blue Electric Chair” – a remake of Gerrit Rietveld’s iconic 1918 Red and Blue Chair – is his version of the electric chair. Drawing from the history of art and design and his personal life, the artist who originally intended to be a set designer references capital punishment in the United States, and how electricity was used by the Chilean junta as an instrument of torture and frequent power cuts as a way to isolate and control citizens.
Ivàn Navarro, Shrapnel V, 2020, LED, glass paint, wood, sand-blasted mirror, one-way mirror and ... [+]
Navarro was just a year old when General Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile in 1973 in a coup d’état that overthrew the democratically-elected president Salvador Allende. Growing up in Santiago under the shadow of a two decade-long, bloody military dictatorship that left thousands dead or missing, he lived in constant fear of being “disappeared”, following the imprisonment of his father, a political cartoonist, graphic designer and socialist university dean heading the propaganda department. “It was always that feeling of not knowing,” he recalls. “My parents always thought that some catastrophic situation might happen. There were people shooting outside and constant blackouts and water cuts, so you had to store water and keep a battery-operated radio, candles and flashlights. Basically you couldn’t trust anyone. You had to be very careful, mind your own business, go to work or to school, then go back home. At around 9pm every day, there was a curfew to keep people under control, so very similar to what we’re living now. It was way more violent, but the routine was very similar.”
Iván Navarro, Red and Blue Electric Chair, 2004, fluorescent tubes and metal, 48 × 31 × 45 in.
However, Navarro is not trying to make overt socio-political statements through his art. He places more emphasis on a spirit of contradiction: new pieces in opposition to old pieces. “What is important is that every work is almost a criticism of the previous work I made,” he notes. “That’s how I keep creating. I don’t look for political problems to make a new piece. I think once you do something very well with a material, the meanings will come. This logic also gives you a lot of freedom because you just say, ‘Today, I’m making a chair, and what’s the opposite of a chair?’” Upon his move to New York in 1997, the connections between his art and political history became more evident. It was also there that his work began to engage with Minimalism, which manifested in terms of form, but he subverted its apolitical nature. “When I came to the US, I was interested in lights, then I saw the work of Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, and my work started connecting to them because that was my new context, but also understanding my own background,” he explains. “What I did was to connect certain political or social ideas to the very classic materials of Minimalism, something that Minimalism always lacked in content because it’s more visual.”
The ingenuity of Navarro’s brightly-shining works lies in their simple, essential and perfectly-mastered esthetic that seduces viewers, inviting them to surrender themselves to an immersive experience to carry out their own reflection. Wanting audiences to ask questions, his works may be read on a variety of levels, offering endless meanings. “The interesting part about being an artist is you find things that nobody thought of before,” he says. “You’re like a magician – you suddenly show people that it’s possible to make art with something that they never thought of. The biggest challenge is to make them think in a different way. The key moment is when they don’t understand how the work is made. It challenges their perception because they start imagining things and their creativity starts flowing. Then you realize that your art is triggering something in people’s minds.”
Exhibition views at Centquatre in Paris
A recent retrospective on the past 20 years of Navarro’s career at Parisian cultural center, Centquatre, presented creations whose original function is subverted and in their place are sculptures that force people to contemplate what they are looking at, and consider the possible new meanings for these objects once they are transformed into art. Up next is a public installation for the future Villejuif Institut Gustave-Roussy metro station of the Grand Paris Express designed by French architect Dominique Perrault, which is set to open in 2026. Called “Cadran Solaire (Sundial)”, Navarro’s artwork is composed of 300 light boxes, each bearing the name of a star that can be seen from earth with the naked eye in different languages. He remarks, “It’s an interesting history of language because it shows languages from ancient to recent times from all over the world, as every time a new star is found, it usually gets a name connected to the geographical place of its discovery.”
Last year, Navarro’s exhibition, “Planetarium”, at Galerie Templon in Paris, marked the first time he used paint. In 2020, he had returned to a more handmade production due to restrictions from the Covid-19 pandemic, while at the same time collecting images of nebulae. Considered astronomy’s world capital, Chile contains the majority of global infrastructure, mainly observatories and telescopes, as the skies in the country’s north are very clear, so many enthusiasts visit it to commune with the cosmos. Mixing light boxes and paint, Navarro recreated celestial phenomena in the manner of a planetarium representing the universe through man-made images. “It’s part of the same idea of doing something I’ve never done,” he discloses. “I was making minimalistic light boxes using words, and everything had to be super clean. I always had a problem with scratches on the glass that would completely destroy the piece, but then I said why don’t I take advantage of that? So I started experimenting by scratching mirrors, painting and staining, and then I realized that they looked like nebulae.”
Iván Navarro at work in his studio in Brooklyn
Grinding out thousands of dots on a mirror with a handheld Dremel rotary tool to allow light from the LEDs to penetrate, Navarro thereafter adds color to them one by one, applies fluid stained-glass paint on top of a glass plate laid on the ground, does the same with another piece of glass, then combines them through a clever play of mirrors and one-way mirrors to give the illusion of powerful stellar explosions in infinite space. The results are three-dimensional paintings that appear to have captured fragments of space, from cosmic landscapes to constellations and eclipses. “For abstract expressionists, it’s almost like painting is a representation of the body’s movement, but not for me,” he states. “I’m trying to do something different from the history of abstract painting. It’s not expressionist; it’s just a bunch of colors thrown together. The idea is to collapse the gesture.” And there he goes again, contradicting everything that has come before.
