Iván Navarro (b. 1972)

Ivan Navarro’s neon-based practice not only assembles structures of stark Minimalist beauty, but explores the social, economic and political meanings that inhere within the electric light itself. Born in 1972 in Chile, Navarro grew up under the dictatorship of Agustin Pinochet, and his art is profoundly informed both by the culture of control that organised and suppressed Chilean society, and that removed art from public life. The lights of Navarro’s work, often shaped into household objects, have their origins in the artist’s memory of the power cuts and curfews used to enforce authority – not to mention the even more nefarious use of light and electricity at the heart of the government’s torturing of political prisoners. As the artist has said, ‘You needed a flashlight to get to the radio, which was like an altar in the house, to hear the news. All the pieces that I’ve made make reference to controlling activity, and electricity was a way to control people’ (I. Navarro, in H. M. Sheets, ‘Man of Refraction’, Art News, Jan 2012, https://www.artnews.com/2012/01/26/man-of-refraction/ [accessed Mar 24, 2017]). In Come (2010), the artist constructs an illusionistic box of mirrors, whose reflective surfaces shape a corridor of light that leads toward the ambiguous, imperative word of the work’s title: ‘come’. A sense of control diffuses through the work, indeterminate and uncertain: in the metaphorical space of the box the viewer seems to be both imprisoned by its physical walls and liberated in the endless expanse of dark and light, while the word itself resounds with a polyphony of ambiguous meanings, at once amicable, seductive and authoritative.