artnexus #77

Iván Navarro (Chile, 1972, lives and works in New York) started using electricity in his earliest works, such as La gran lámpara, from 1996. Two central interests were already outlined in his initial approaches: the creation of light constructions that not only emphasized the use of energy but, through electrical circuits, lighting networks, lamps and other light resources, questioned the understanding of art objects as non-functional. The strategy Navarro deployed to contest this assumption was to turn his works into an active interrelation with the viewer, as he sought to interrogate the border that separates an everyday object from a sculpture. Belonging to a generation raised under the Pinochet dictatorship meant understanding the artistic act in complex circumstances; thus, the materiality Navarro gives his objects is analyzed from many perspectives. His emblematic sculptures built on the basis of fluorescent tubes use light to express a critique of power and its uses: form, material, and content are presented as inseparable resources. Navarro uses referents derived from Minimalism to interpellate official narratives and to rethink his country’s recent history. He breaks with Frank Stella’s “it is just what you see” and incorporates concerns of a social and cultural nature into the poetic orthodoxy of minimalist art. In the work reproduced on our cover, Eternal Contradiction, the play with the words we and me, projected linearly, not only alludes to the possibility of turning the former term to make it into the latter but points also towards the complex relationship between the notions of the singular and the plural. We must not forget that the I is part of a more complex us, which contains us as members of a given social group. 
IVONNE PINI