Event detail
Adrian Navarro. BUTP 2008. Oil, acrylic and digital printing on canvas. 2,00x1,85m
New series of works combining painting and screen-printing on canvas.
The Common People paintings are individual and group portraits of urban character which arise from the artist’s direct contact with the city of London.
The use of screen-printing has added direct graphic value to these new works by Adrian Navarro: the presence of the photographic image has served to reproduce the faces and looks which he has encountered whilst walking through the streets of London. In Panda Band, for example, he places us before a local London scene (in the East End) where a group of young people meet and interact in a concert. Something similar is happening in Butp in which a series of figures observe the viewer from different urban locations.
The flâneur has paced the streets, observed and listened to the city; he has gathered information, gone back to the studio and renders it on the canvas. Along the way he has acquired an impression, in the strictest sense of the term. As the artist himself has indicated, “painting for me is a means, not an end”. A means which, in this case, may combine street art, graffiti or collage techniques, but which, all said and done, is clearly single-minded in its purpose: aiming to show a specific angle on the world that surrounds him, contemporary street-life and its protagonists, the city as it is now.
http://www.adriannavarro.com
