Evarist Navarro

The exhibition that Evarist Navarro is presenting at the IVAM is organised around three large installations made especially for this show: Estaciones balsámicas (Balmy Seasons), Palacio de la memoria (Palace of Memory) and Terra Mater (Mother Earth). These monumental works act as a connecting theme from which the artist develops a powerful metaphor about the mechanisms that make the construction of memory possible, explored in over a hundred works, including watercolours, pottery, drawings and small terracotta sculptures. Evaristo Navarro’s work is characterised by his obsessive, systematic use of clay. The artist gives this humble material a strong poetic quality and makes it the prime medium with which he develops all his constructive and metaphorical strategies. The characteristics of the material are precisely what determines the flexibility and plasticity of his work and gives it a tactile, almost craft-like facture, far from the impersonality typical of mass-produced industrial objects. The choice of clay as his material links his work with the ancient craft of working with clay and pottery and also with the manufacturing tradition in his own family. Evarist Navarro gives his works an architectural arrangement and structure with which he seeks to shape the abstract representation of everyday places. Both in his installations and in his small sculptures he projects an essential monumental quality onto his work that evokes primitive constructions, huts, shelters or ruins in which to take refuge.