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Indepth Arts News:
"Juan Navarro Baldeweg: Plastic Trajectory"
2002-04-12 until 2002-06-16
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea
Santiago, ,
ES Spain
This exhibition surveys four decades of the plastic trajectory of Juan Navarro
Baldeweg (Santander, 1939). An architect of international prestige, he has always
regarded himself as a painter to-ing and fro-ing “from one room to another”, busying
himself with the problems involved in defining space and its energies, endeavouring
to depict “what is in the air and in between things”.
The selection commences with four paintings of the sixties, related to American
Post-painterly Abstraction. It also includes Conceptual works begun in the seventies,
during the artist’s sojourn with Gyorgy Kepes at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology). These are small works that study the most elementary forms of
perception: light, the phenomena of balance and the force of gravity.
From the nineties are the large-scale works Triptico de Bizhad (Triptych of Bizhad,
1999), in which Navarro Baldeweg resorts to a classical subject, the artist’s atelier;
Paisaje (Landscape, 1991), where he studies sensations and energies, birds, the
turbulence of rain and the rays of light and wind surrounding his house in Alicante;
Retratos (Portraits, 1999), and Casa y dragón (House and Dragon, 1998), where the
loft of his house acts as both a frame and a stage set, while the planes of colour and
lines evoke different moods. All these works evince the artist’s fondness for the
complex registers of the Persian miniaturist painter Bizhad, and for the Oriental
graphics of Hiroshige.
His last project is an installation entitled Garabatos (Doodles) carried out specifically
for the Double Space at CGAC, where it accompanies the exhibition like a warm
“murmur”.
IMAGE:
Juan Navarro Baldeweg
Casa e dragón, 1998
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