BRIEF AND ETERNAL, AT THE SAME TIME / SIMULTANEOUSLY
Just as the petals of the lotus opened, announcing a new day, so did the notes of the harp as Neheh brushed the fragile strings of her instrument under the sycamore, by the banks of the Nile.
‘Let it smell of lotus and give shade to words’, at the same time let it recall a lively, warm summer night and a calm, cold winter dawn; let it evoke sunrise, the appearance of the solar disk in the sky, if we refer to the magical days Akhetaton’s city life, or the brightness of Ra, if we are in front of the majestic temple of Amun in Thebes under the command of Ramses II.
Like the Greeks, Egyptians also travelled, but they were the first ones to fossilize their groves to become their temples, it was the walk among the trees bathed by the Nile, which allowed them to see, transform, turn into stone and consecrate their flora. It was a FLEETING knowledge, which ETERNALIZED a vision, a sensation, a perfume, a room, in essence a transformed space, which is alive for us still.
Antonio Navarro says: ‘From silence I reinvent new landscapes, where to shelter, where to hide, where to lose myself’… But he does not seek to find himself from that silence, why? Andrè Gide said: ‘The art of losing contact with reality and life, soon becomes artifice’. I believe that Professor Navarro (sensitive and romantic) needs the overlapping of reality and life, because he flees from artifice and chimera, and that’s where he finds himself. Those landscapes are real, they are full of life. It is spring, it is winter… They are the seasons, their perfume is felt, they are heard, they are music in its purest essence.
He travels, he absorbs each thing he feels to present later, in digital prints, what emotions are, which fleetingly constitute a reality, a trance in the same way that Jackson Pollock claimed to be inside his painting, in a situation that could evoke a trance or a trip, assuming that they are different things… Professor Navarro suggests paths which hypnotize… fleeting landscapes, which run away and disappear furtively… Is not that a trance?
From all these works measured technically, the author allows us to travel in silence; to pass from winter to summer in the twinkling of an eye; to dream constructing its reality, which now will be ours; to play with the transience of the ephemeral and eternalize it in the work itself, represented in colours, forms, non-forms, lines, shadows, voids, silences, perfumes… transforming the experience lived in eternal emotion. Is this not what Cavafis spoke about in Itaka, one of his best-known poems, when he says that the journey provides wisdom?
At first I stated that BRIEF is eternal, something that I am absolutely convinced about and with great reason Agustín García Calvo affirmed that ‘journey is life, arrival, and death’; thus he persuaded us not to be in too much of a hurry to arrive and enjoy the journey. The question is, does our artist die every time he arrives at the end of his journey? … I believe that it is NOT categorically, because he travels and continues to build on these digital prints, fleetingly, eternally…
‘If parks and large urban spaces are added to all of No Man’s Land, abandoned margins full of weeds, etc., we can see that space continues to spread at different scales, constituting the base on which urban structures grow which, using a physical term, we can call clusters: a shapeless accumulation where matter is concentrated and organized, forming structures. In spite of its complexity, the drawing of the city to which empty spaces would be added, could be read again as a form through the use of complex geometries. It is a form that contemporary civilization has built ‘spontaneously’ for itself in order to self-represent, independently of the theories of architects and urban planners, and for this reason can be considered the result of a natural process, a dynamic and complex process that, like the processes of cloud formation and galaxies, can be described by fractal geometry’. Francesco Careri.
But what Professor Julián Díaz Sánchez, the most delicate artistland, says ‘art and travel may be the same thing’, Richard Long has formulated with great clarity: ‘a walk is a line of footsteps. A sculpture is a line of stones. They are interchangeable, complementary. I have turned walking into carving’.
Antonio Navarro makes lines with emptiness, surrounding them with emotion…
Pilar Escanero de Miguel
Full Professor of Miguel Hernández University
