Provenance: Private Collection, Bacolod City

ABOUT THE WORK

To intrigue the eye — Navarro’s dynamic work captures the mystique of abstract illusionism. Jerry Elizalde Navarro has made a substantial reputation as an artist whose singular oeuvre is one of the most complex by anyone of his generation. Navarro creates vivid mash ups of color and gestural strokes. Navarro’s art contains elements of Japanese, Balinese and Western painting traditions that merge to make singularly intimate works. Gestural painting draws its sources not only from surrealism but from Asian aesthetics as well, which places a premium on spontaneity and quick insight. Gesture is very important in this kind of painting. In contrast to this impersonality akin to automatism, Navarro’s art derives from subjective forces. Bold brushstrokes traverse the canvas with a haphazard orientation. The traces of the paint loaded brush are highly visible, overlapping, and forming thick ridges, pools of pigment, and streaks and splatters of impasto. There are some areas of defined color shapes to stabilize and give weight to the composition. At the core of his art are modernism’s freedom and a freshness of spirit that immediately draws one into his vision of the world.