Accompanied by a certificate signed by the artist confirming the authenticity of this lot

ABOUT THE WORK

Jerry Elizalde Navarro’s sojourn to Bali, Indonesia in the late 1980s injected colors into his life, both creatively and physically. Already at the age of sixty-five, Navarro had resigned himself to a life of obscurity, his works languishing unsold in his studio. However, one fateful encounter with Cornelius Choy kickstarted, once again, his artistic career. His 1996 The Earth Goddess bears the beauty of Bali he encountered almost a decade later. The vibrancy of colors he used captivated his audiences, just like they did Navarro when he first stepped on the island. Navarro had found himself captivated by the movement of the exotic dances he watched and that bled into The Earth Goddess. Sweeping strokes of vibrant yellows and fiery reds and deep green mimic the flash of movements too quick for a camera to capture, its fleetingness emphatically illustrated through gestural strokes. “In my sketches, no attempt at detailing has been done except to capture the layering of tantalizing movements, nervous and sinuous at the same time,” Navarro writes in his October 15, 1989 Philippine Daily Inquirer Bali On My Mind. In the same vein as this statement, The Earth Goddess manages to capture the vibrant movements of the dance, its intense colors an echo of the feverish frenzy of creation he embarked on upon facing the captivating culture of Bali, Indonesia. (Hannah Valiente)