In November, Chilean artist Iván Navarro returns to his New York base after five years of profound exploration, worldwide exhibition and pandemic seclusion, to unveil a new, contemplative but passionate body of work for TEMPLON New York’s second exhibition

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.

Exhibition views, Celestialand, Templon New York, 2022. ©Charles Roussel

“These astral wonders are an integral part of all civilizations. From time immemorial, humans have wanted to domesticate or label what does not belong to them: the stars and planets are the most obvious example”

- Iván Navarro

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.

Iván Navarro, Large Eclipse, 2022, Ed. of 3 + 1 AP. © Charles Roussel