Iván Navarro: The Bright Sun

Luciana Brito Galeria is pleased to announce the representation of Chilean artist Iván Navarro (b. 1972), who is now reintroduced to the Brazilian audience with his first solo show at the gallery, a two-week intervention titled The Bright Sun. The exhibition opens on August 4th and can be visited until August 18th.

For The Bright Sun, Navarro will present a set of wall sculptures in the context of a broader intervention in the gallery’s Rino Levi room: each of the two glass walls that separate the room from the winter garden located in the center of the house will be covered by a transparent colored film, one yellow and the other blue – two of the five colors of the Olympic rings. Since each ring color originally represents one continent, through this intervention, Navarro deconstructs the visual identity of the institutionalized Olympic symbols by assuring that each sculpture displayed in the room will be perceived as yellow, blue or green (the sum of the two colors) depending on the viewers physical position.

Most of the wall sculptures presented in the show belong to the series Nowhere Man, based on twenty-one pictograms designed by Otl Aicher for the 1972 Munich Olympics, each of them depicting a particular Olympic sport. Created with tubes of fluorescent white light that can be easily found in any functional space, Navarro’s pictograms give a domestic and ordinary connotation to what should represent the apex of an individual athletic conquest. By choosing an everyday material as medium for the series, Navarro questions the representative logic of both Aicher’s pictograms and the event itself, where athletes are ultimately seen as representatives of their nations of origin instead of individuals.

The two remaining Olympic colors – red and black – will be expressed in the show by other artworks. Black will be represented in a new video called Bandeira Preta [Black Flag] that presents a large flag flying in the wind, which is, in turn, composed of many small flags from a multitude of different countries. Within the framework of the show, the piece makes an allusion to the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes and one West German police officer in the terrorist attack that took place during the second week of the 1972 Munich Olympics, perpetrated by Black September Palestinian terrorists. And finally, red will be the dominant color of the other works, from different series also included in the show, thus creating a broader context for Navarro’s production in the exhibition that is his reintroduction to the Brazilian audience.

Iván Navarro’s work is rooted in the interplay between two main axes: the history of art and the history of politics. On the one hand, his artworks are carefully constructed from a formalist point of view and establish a direct dialogue with Minimalism, especially through the use of light as a primary medium. In contrast to the Modernist principle, however, Navarro’s production is infused with highly political connotations, which are communicated to the audience through numerous strategies, as seen in the titles of the works (like his famous Electric Chairs series), the careful use of color, or the appropriation and deconstruction of symbols that represent ideologies and institutional power.