Description of project by Ignacio Moreno
The space lacks qualities. Its properties are explained by what happens in it: light in light; support in gravitation and balances; the expanded body, the hand in space; doing and undoing, the conscience of building, which is also destroying... and by our experience linked to those essential coordinates in which things are harbored. A common determination governs the interrelation among paintings, projects, sculptures and installations, and goes
and is transferred from one work to another.
Juan Navarro Baldeweg
Juan Navarro Baldeweg’s creative labour spans disciplines as diverse as architecture, painting, installation art, sculpture and essay writing. His artistic output constitutes a singular body of work remarkable both for its coherence and the range of media it encompasses. The transfer of ideas and concepts from one art form to another that characterizes Navarro Baldeweg’s work broadens the traditional conceptual boundaries of the field of architecture. The multiple influences in his work and his interest in applying the same set of principles to whatever medium he employs, have led him to focus on the manner in which one discipline flows into another, on the ways of creating passageways between the fields of each artistic practice.
Navarro Baldeweg’s use of the “ring” as a conceptual framework for artistic expression dates back to his 1980 painting Lunas, in which he depicted the changing positions of the moon in relation to an invisible sun, whose presence is inferred by its reflection in the lunar images encircling it, against a red background. This composition groups Navarro Baldeweg’s work around four motifs always central to him: gravity, light, body and processes. Situating pieces executed in different media within specific rings highlighted their common determinations and narrative plotline. Shunning the more conventional chronological or thematic approach to exhibition design, Navarro Baldeweg stresses in these texts that his paintings, pieces and architectures –albeit created at different times or using different media– are all affected by perceived, reflected or amplified energies, and can thus be arranged or grouped in conceptual rings, allowing us to become aware of shared essential coordinates. An exhibition thus organized allows spectators to move through the mental space of the artist, hopping from ring to ring and exploring the works on display as elements within an artistic zodiac.
The pieces, sculptures, drawings, photographs and architectural models proposed constitute a representative section of his artistic output since the 1970s, as an artist workshop, that demonstrates the continued pursuit of various threads of research over time.
Ignacio Moreno
