the chance of doing, the doing of chance

That is, it is about transform chance into causality, and causality into chance. It was precisely a chance that made us meet back in 1969 when I became, suddenly, at the age of twenty-two, a professor of Aesthetics and Composition at the Higher Technical School of Architecture (ETSAM), where Juan Navarro was already a professor, and I coordinated the Seminar on Automatic Generation of Plastic Forms at the Calculation Center of the University of Madrid (CCUM), in which he also participated.

At the CCUM, between 1970 and 1973, I did with the Apostleship of El Greco what many years later would be called pixelization and I created a grammar of renaissance courtyardsalso called plateresques, which Juan Navarro Baldeweg knows very well, as can be seen from his exceptional Palace of Congresses and Exhibitions of Castilla y León, which he created in Salamanca between 1985 and 1992. These chance coincidences laid the foundations for our relationship and, in my case, the great interest that his work aroused in me even then.

The exhibition that can be seen in the Cibeles Palace houses paintings – which with their colors and shapes They aspire to make the place where they are habitable–, models, like their splendid overhead light structuresin addition to various images of his architectural creation and photographs of his most conceptual works…

Among these there is one that impressed me when I saw it in the seventies, I think it was in the Buades gallery, where we often met. That work was The spine and weightphotograph in which the column stands out as the heavy element, while the weight – miniscule compared to the column – is of an amazing lightness.

In that work Juan Navarro reveals to us his interest in the law of gravity that makes things heavy and that is one of the fundamental conditions of works of architecture, of buildings. An equally light weight appears in Wheel and weighta work in which the weight prevents the wheel from rotating. The theme of gravity also appears in golden hoop and in Shared weightwith the wheel resting on a finger of the artist’s hand. In two pesos returns to the question of the law of gravity expressed sculpturally.

In the sea We find again two wheels – symbols of circular movement – ​​which Juan Navarro’s art is so fond of. In that case they are joined by a long rope in the center of which a round wax candle stands out. Obviously, when the candle is lit the flame defies the law of gravity, escapes from his empire.

There is no doubt that that basic law of mechanical physics It is of great importance for an architect like him, as evidenced by the fantastic and mathematical dome that covers the aforementioned Palace of Congresses and Exhibitions of Castilla y León.

Painting…, the fruit of doing and chance, connects with two aspects of the art that Juan Navarro was able to experience in his youth, thanks to the work of his father, who painted landscapes with mastery, and his early studies at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid.

Over time, Navarro Baldeweg’s painting became more colorful, dazzling and architecturally figurative.

I am referring to the combination that makes action painting with compositional structuralism, as seen in his Landscapes (1990-1992) and, of course, with architecture. “In every painting there is an implicit embodiment of a room and its inhabitant“This statement by Juan Navarro gives us one of the keys to his painting, as evidenced by his 2017 paintings: Tower, Night, Goblin, Blade, Light in formation, Tower and clouds.

“Images are created,” Juan Navarro also tells us, “to drive away the anguish of infinity“Infinity…, that is one of the metaphysical concerns of our artist. Over time his painting became more colorful, dazzling and architecturally figurative.

There is a lot of chromatic explosion and geometric control; of tradition and avant-garde; even of the avant-garde tradition that dawns with the impressionism of Monet and, above all, with the work of Matisse.

Another contribution that appears in the Centro-Centro exhibition is that of models in which the buildings appear in their essential compositional features. I mean Elemental architectures with overhead light (1990), overhead light structures (1990-1992) y Light structure in the light, I and II (1990, 1999).

These models invite us to enter their architecture.. I want to start by highlighting the Auditorium of the Castilla y León Congress Center, in Salamanca, the first great architectural achievement by Juan Navarro that I was able to see. I am from a Salamanca family and we often went to visit our family in Salamanca, where my father and mother studied law at the University. Furthermore, one of my main investigations was, as I said, on the Plateresque patios, so significant in this city.

In the Juan Navarro Auditorium I admired how he got combine the classic with the avant-gardethe technological with the poetic, the shocking with the delicate. He carried out very different architectural developments in his Center for the Performing Arts of the Community of Madrid (2000-2008), whose façade opens to the wide streets like a folding book composed of pictorial sheets, or in his Hertziana Library, in Rome.

It is impossible to synthesize here the varied work of Navarro Baldeweg, his aesthetic thinking, his career from the Santander of his Altamira Museum to the Madrid of his Pedro Salinas library, near the Puerta de Toledo. This would require not only your sound mirror (1970-1972), sino make it a mirror that treasures all kinds of facesbuildings, landscapes and, if necessary, all kinds of fantastic mirages.