Ivan Navarro - "Where is the next war?" Solo Exhibition

Venue: Daniel Templon Gallery | Dates: April 25 – June 1 | Text and Photos by Chen Chi-Hsiang

Ivan Navarro (born 1972) is a Chilean artist based in New York, one of today’s most representative artists exploring light. During my visit to the “Light Show” special exhibition in London last May, I saw his monumental skyscraper object installation Chile reality show-silver. In his previous solo exhibition at D. Templon Gallery, he exhibited light sculptures constructed from industrial fluorescent tubes. This time, the solo exhibition features eye-catching and bewildering neon object installations. He uses light as a basic material medium, constructing it into light sculptures that transform space into a field for visual perception. Navarro borrows modernist iconography to expose a crisis of empty formalism, transforming extreme aesthetics into active social and political critique. Growing up under Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile, his works often grapple with issues of power, control, and the imprisonment of bodies or psychology.

The theme of Navarro’s “Where is the next war?” solo exhibition derives from the subject matter of Goya’s Disasters of War etchings by the 19th-century Spanish painter. Formally, it draws on the work of German artist Josef Albers, utilizing systematic, orderly, yet experimental visual illusion effects, most famously seen in his Adieux au carré (Farewell to the Square). The overall exploration centers on square forms; like infinite extensions of pictures—windows—in constant flashing and jumping neon sequences, the artist simultaneously inscribes phrases such as “Pain of the Present” or “They Cannot Arrive on Time” onto the windows. Language appears as a flash of consciousness, reflecting dual sensations and manifesting painful memories within the gap between appearance and truth, expressing his perspective on contemporary society and politics. Additionally, two white neon installations titled Untitled-twin towers, laid flat on the floor in the small exhibition hall, extend infinitely downward, alluding to the Twin Towers of New York. As the artist explains: “This is an anti-American economic power monument, carrying inherent social trauma.” (Note)

Note: Information sourced from the press release for Navarro - "Where is the next war?" Solo Exhibition at Daniel Templon Gallery.