BERLIN.- Maerz Contemporary Berlin announced the opening Raumzeit featuring the London based artist Adrian Navarro. His work characteristically depicts precise, intensely colored abstractions - spheres, planes and other spatial figures - revealing hidden dimensions seemingly beyond the canvas.
Adrian Navarro’s formal training as an architect inspires and gives essence to his colored variations on form and pattern and allows for the degree of perfection he achieves in conceiving and executing his paintings. The viewer is drawn not only to the illusion created by his mesmerizing arrangement of digital age tesselations but also his range of explosive monochrome colors characterizing each individual painting. Maerz Contemporary presents selected works from three different phases of Adrian Navarro’s titled Spaces, Fugues and Spheres, respectively, and completed in the years 2014 to 2016.
Raumzeit, or in English Spacetime, is a term based on a mathematical formula conceived by Minkowski, a student of Einstein’s, in 1908. His model links space, the three Euclidian geometric dimensions, with time, the fourth dimension, into a single related continuum. In ancient times, the Inca civilization had a similar concept calling it Pacha and imaginative authors like Edgar Allen Poe and H. G. Wells wrote about four dimensions a century before modern mathematics defined the concept. It is also a good heading for this exhibition where spatial figures create space for color, or light and substance, to inhabit and flow within the boundaries of a grid, in a kind of independent universe from the picture plane of the canvas.
What takes Adrian Navarro’s artistic concept a „dimension beyond“ is not only the illusionary depth suggested by his forms. It is also the tense dialogue, a sort of hybrid dialectic he creates between contained form and its infinite expansion: his flat canvas appears to have three dimensions; there is repetition where there is also chance; Navarro’s tangerine-dreamlike-colors, so organic in substance, are contained within a pure white surface skin. Then again we see light escaping from white holes in his Fugues. What is inside, what is outside? Digital or real? Physical or artificial? It is as if Navarro were composing variations on Goethe’s proposed symmetric color wheel within abstractions of M.C. Escher’s perfectly geometric fantasy constructs. The artist integrates physical with virtual aspects on his experimental canvas and takes the viewer along on this existential journey.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in Spain, Navarro began his career as an artist in New York City in the year 2000 after obtaining his MA in Architecture in Madrid. In 2008 he completed his art school training at Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design and has since settled in London. His most recent shows from May to December 2015 were in Bern, Switzerland at Da Mihi gallery; at Galería Maior in Mallorca; and at Art Miami in December 2015. Maerz Contemporary will be showing Adrian Navarro’s work for the second time in Berlin after a premiere in 2012.
