Iván Navarro
“Tierra de Nadie”
Geert Goiris
“Czar bomba”
Eduard Resbier
“Estancia en el desierto”
24 May – 12 September 2010
Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB
C/ Saldaña s/n
09003 Burgos, Spain)
www.cabdeburgos.com
Light and shade opacity and transparency, appearance and reality are the elements that shape the two energy poles that feed Ivan Navarro’s (Santiago de Chile, 1972) enigmatic light sculptures built with fluorescent lamps, mirrors and neon light bulbs. The Chilean artist has been settled in New York since 1997 and is the maximum exponent of the Chilean young artists generation. Shopping carts, wheelbarrows and rocking chairs link his work to a cosy idea of daily life. However, the shiny and colourful silhouettes of his objects, that recall the ones used in captivating messages in this consumer society, are on the brink of darkness and fear.
In fact, the artist makes use of these household objects, inhabited by alien social intentions, and makes them play different roles, by submitting the electric material to a new signification of deep motivations and several meanings in which light works as a social metaphor that makes the viewer reflect on his aesthetic guidelines and look for a more complex interpretation of each formal work of art.
Geert Goiris
The Belgian photographer Geert Goiris (Bornem, 1971), tireless traveler, has been halfway around the world in recent years, from the poles to the desert, looking for silent and desolate landscapes on the very edges of civilisation or within its borders, looking for places dispossessed of the shelter-like quality they once had: deserted hotels, idle machines, corridors through which nobody goes, abandoned buildings in a hostile environment.
Goiris uses the resources for documentary photography: his images are neat and objectively constructed, everything is legible in them, and yet, this naturalism barely conceals a dream-like depth which gives way to a disturbing ambiguity.
The images display an odd narrative quality that bestows them with an ethereal condition: they seem to capture the indefinite revelation of a former presence or the ominous feeling of a threat which is about to occur rather than a moment targeted by the camera. Sometimes, it is the perception of a human presence, yet it seldom appears in the image – in some occasions they are small buildings, often besieged by their environment – as if the artist’s objective was to capture the human world while we are absent. Other times, the grandeur of natural beauty seems to be at risk, on the point of corruption.
Eduard Resbier
Most art critics point out the influence that modern register such as photography or video have on Eduard Resbier’s pictorial work. It should be nonetheless clarified that a very particular relationship is established between them: a sort of para-photographic distillation of painting in which a pencil and sometimes some brushes lead the image captured by the camera, used as a prolongation of the artist’s sensorial experience, to a universe of suggestion, subjectivity and disturbing atmospheres, characteristic of the most classical parameters in pictorial art.
Resbier has been considered by some critics as being on the very edges of neo-romanticism, close to Friedrich, Turner or Constable. Resbier goes from a figurative grammar towards abstraction, this gives way to works conveying a sort of restless visual texture, often out of focus, distorted pieces in which material dimensions are not very reliable and in which the artist’s gaze remains at a distance in order to give us a more original way of observing what happens around us.
