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The year of the Horse began to rule on February 12, 2002; according to the chinese calendar, which equally corresponds to the seventh animal of such horoscope crowded with brimming beasts of emblematic keys. With a profound mystical-symbolic equine content, Equus in its latin root, for the chinese population, refers to the hottest hours of the day and the sunniest seasons of the year, and apears in abundant teogónicas representations of Chinese art. The cosmogonic chance wanted, as well, that the panamanian artist Eduardo Navarro (Panama 1960), initiated his surprisingly revealing series dedicated to the theme of the horse, precisely on february 2002. Although, if we take for certain that there are no coincidences, we can adventure that the artists keen perception of the cosmic pulses, his profound connection with nature and that telluric force that takes over him in his creating trances, pushed him and wrapped him towards the ancestral itineraries that impulsed the year of the horse. Nothing i its pictorical evolution allowes to suspect that he would praise through these courses, this because in his diverse stages the representation of animals was absent, taking in exclusively the skinned human form or its spiritual and immaterial dimension in his series dedicated to fallen angels. Only in his stage inspired on Renaissance masters and on classic mythology we might receive sparkles and insinuations of his present equine serie, therefore we might point out as his origin the sculpture of monumental dimensions thathe created for the Eleta en Haras Cerro Punta residence in the year 1996. More interesting would be the analysis of sources from which originates Navarro’s inspired series of horses, because his search we know is mended on the same dawns of the human pictorical creation in Laxcaux or Altamira. There, - where his naturalist and symbol and key pregnant art and where everything conspires to accomplish the ambiguous magical atmosphere, our artist picks up te keys that lead him through a historic itinerary that goes through the most inspiration of the equine subject in art. From the Roman world he retakes the passion for equestrian sculpture in its most virile and authoritarian expression. They are horses that fight in apic battles and can be used to be ridden by civilizer heroes. They are horses that summon the presence of Aquiles, Alexander and Augusto Cesar, horses which invite to penetrate masculine worlds overloaded with primitive forces, in a speech where the heroic and the erotic balance the combat. In “Paolo Uccello’s San Romano Battle”, we may find slight signs of the renaissance keys that Navarro uses to recover formal languages that refer to the management of the spaces, the colors and the volumes of the horses. Coincidences, which may be also found in othe pieces of Renaissance artists that like Leonardo used the horse as a theme, a vehicle for the study of volumes in movement. From decorative ancient chinese arts, Navarro’s work taes its most evident inspiration. The massive presence of his horses, which occupy almost all the space, and which also seem to escape in some pieces from the borders of the pictorical surface, it specially picks up the tendency towards almost sculptural volumes very characteristic of this series. However, the result, far from evoking severe hieratism which takes us to the terracota horse of Xi’an, translates in free forms of free great movement which break the space with the panache and the animal strngth that only untamable tempers, such as Eduardo Navarro’s, is capable of communicating through canvas. The ambiguity between the figure and the pictorical backgrounds common to all pieces, evokes flawed spaces already characteristic in the artists previous work. In the same way his risky color treatment and the subyugation of the drawing to this element, recieves a dynamic balance of rising results loaded with a strong sensuality. Faithful to his expressive style, to tha agressive an impacient image, it innovates thematicly by dedicating himself in this ocassionin a monographic way to the equine matter. It surprises, as always by it’s untamable treatment of the pictorical medium and its tumultuous backgrounds, opossed to the overwhelming pressence of the figure-theme. It fills us as always with the exhuberating beaty of the excessive, the wild, the overloaded and the poetic. Eduardo
Navarro is already a dedicated poet of shapes, of color and of
spaces. Let’s enjoy the fortune of participating, once more,
of te epic of his paintings and the secret bewitching of his dreams
and mysteries. |