Provenance: The Drawing Room

ABOUT THE WORK

The Liberation of Color. Jerry Elizalde Navarro seems almost too affable for a guy whose soulful art has in its own way torn through the fabric of Filipino painting and even through the hard surface of sculpture. His canvases have managed to imprint their agitated force on the local art scene. Jerry Elizalde Navarro is the painter-poet, alluring, seasoned by the decadesm “unpindownable” for his love of life, witty down to his written verses. His art is as New York-ish as it is Asian. In 1964, he visited New York as a member of the design group of the Philippine delegation to the World’s Fair where he was commissioned to install a large iron mural). The Big Apple was also where he took his first stride towards his personal style with all that exposure to the works of the then internationally established painters and one painter in particular, Wassily Kandinsky. Known for exuding a certain explosive force in his art, Kandinsky prefigured the endless visual motions of abstraction. His works also bear footprints of Japanese sojourn he did, but in this work, this episode is not as discernible as his immersion in Bali. The Indonesian island of Bali has been both an artistic inspiration and a second home to innumerable painters, Asian and Western alike, for more than a century. The lure of the island no less powerful today as it was then. Jerry Elizalde Navarro’s visual vocabulary has acquired a new depth which has resulted in work that celebrates the free spirit of art and the joy of life. His Balinese sojourn started when he became the first Filipino artist at the Yayasan Dharma Seni Museum Neka, in Bali, Indonesia. Eventually Navarro was touched by the island’s Hindu based traditions and in the movements and form. An impact apparent enough for him to entitle one of his shows Bali in my Mind (1989). As well as the island’s effect on his use of color and his gestural cum calligraphic mark - marking, Navarro’s Bali sojourn has also sharpened up his drawing and reawakened and developed his figurative work. Navarro experienced in Bali seeing nature in terms of dynamic forces rather than as purely visual phenomena. With that Balinese spirit, Navarro brought to the oil medium a basically new style: painterly handling, full bodied color.