Nowhere Man | TEMPLON

After his celebrated exhibition at the Venice Biennale where he represents Chile in the Arsenale, young conceptual artist Iván Navarro returns to Galerie Daniel Templon with a spectacular group of light figures inspired by the well-known Olympic Games pictograms.

Born in 1972 in Chile, Iván Navarro moved to New York City in 1997, where his striking light sculptures quickly brought him attention. The experience of growing up under the dictatorship of General Pinochet gave him, like many of his countrymen, a keen awareness of the disconnect between appearance and truth. Influenced by modernist design and minimalism from Rietveld to Flavin or Judd, his work often subverts every day objects – chairs, tools, doors – into neon sculptures with an under-lying subtext exploring authority, punishment and control.

His new series « Nowhere Man » takes as a starting point the pictograms conceived by German designer Otl Aicher’s for the infamous 1972 Munich Olympic Games. With a simple “alphabet” of sticks and circles, they schematically represent the main Olympic disciplines: swimming, boxing, football, diving etc.

Each figure is made of ordinary mass-produced light fixtures. Seemingly cold and technical, they were however built according to the “ideal proportions” theorized by Leonardo Da Vinci. This attempt to recreate a perfect system of representation and beauty with every day, mundane objects, reveals the complex connections between our humanistic heritage and modernism, between the body and post-industrial society.

Through these ghostly, standardized athletes from “nowhere”, Iván Navarro questions the ideological meaning of the Olympic ideal and its universal pretense. As he explains of the five intertwined rings representing the Olympic Games « Each ring is meant to represent a continent, and I’ve always wondered which continent is represented by which color. Is Asia represented by red ? is Africa yellow ? » The group of « Nowhere Man » works was first presented at the inaugural exhibition of the new Towner Contemporary Art Center, Eastbourne, UK (spring 2009).

All works

The artist

Born in 1972 in Santiago, Iván Navarro grew up under the Pinochet dictatorship. He has lived and worked in New York since 1997. Iván Navarro uses light as his raw material, turning objects into electric sculptures and transforming the exhibition space by means of visual interplay. His work is certainly playful, but is also haunted by questions of power, control and imprisonment. The act of usurping the minimalist aesthetic is an ever-present undercurrent, becoming the pretext for understated political and social criticism.