In Celestialand, Navarro turns his attention to the cosmic world. He celebrates the unfathomable magnificence of the universe with his dazzling, galactic skyscapes, while quietly observing the perpetual human impulse to conquer and control, in heaven as it is on earth. In this sense, these new works can be seen as the natural evolution of Navarro’s earlier works that revolved around questions of power, using electrical energy as both metaphor and material. In Celestialand, Navarro witnesses the universe, in all its infinite mystery, also as ethereal “land” claimed by earthly nations as they assign their names, as symbolic flag posts, to even the remotest of stars.

The constellation and nebulae series were born during the depths of the pandemic, when Navarro, like the rest the world, was forced into isolation. He began to make all his work alone and by hand, engraving on mirror in painstaking repetitive gestures and then turning to the use of paint as a hitherto unexplored medium in his work.

For the first time, Iván Navarro, whose practice has thoroughly explored the boundaries between design, architecture and sculpture, began to incorporate material experiments involving mystery and chance, by combining pouring techniques with targeted brushwork on the slick surfaces he had previously treated with objective control. These new, highly expressive and sensorial paintings are the direct result of the heightened emotionality and existential inquiry provoked by the pandemic experience.

In Celestialand, Iván Navarro melds the cool of the mirror, the icy LED and neon lights with the warm eruptions of color to replicate the chimerical, abstract formations of celestial phenomena. In the same way, he mixes the industrially made with the handmade, language with matter, to expose the never-ending drive of humankind to dominate each other and nature. Silently inscribing the names of the stars in modern typeface over the cosmic wilderness of the paintings, Navarro contrasts the human territorial approach to the universe with the unmitigated apprehension of the sublime.