Artists

Ivan Navarro

Press release

The highlight of the exhibition is a monumental sculpture: a cyclops 3,6 meters high, radiating under the glass roof of the Parisian space with its multicolored recycled neon lights. For the first time, Navarro has designed a piece intended to interact with natural light. ‘”The cyclops is a fabulous creature, present in many mythologies,” the artist confides. “In exploring astral phenomena, I encountered this raw and powerful figure, capable, in legends, of making thunder roar and lightning strike. It is a true allegory of natural forces, extending my inquiries into energy and the invisible.”

The exhibition is enriched by a body of work focusing on the cosmos, a theme dear to the artist, rooted in his astronomical Chilean heritage and which he has been exploring steadily for the past five years. Presented for the first time in Europe, his typographic sculptures, in the form of “crosswords”, interweave the names of constellations and planets. The mural compositions, assembled or engraved in mirror, seem suspended between scientific poetry and luminous abstraction. In Lepton II and Zodiac Constellations, thousands of colored dots or stellar silhouettes are etched into the surface of two-way mirrors, creating a dizzying play of infinite reflections. The Sun Traffic installation features traffic lights silently displaying the word “sun” in a darkened room. Both fascinating and disturbing, these imaginary cartographies question the boundaries of astronomy, mental patterns and anthropocentrism.

The second part of the exhibition takes a more political turn. In the new Shell Shocks series, shards of fireworks engraved on diamond-shaped mirrors evoke post-war traumas, and resonate with Navarro’s recurring preoccupations with domination, control and imprisonment – themes marked by his experience under the Pinochet dictatorship. This dimension is extended by several Eyes Charts, imposing prints in the format of eye tests, in which words such as “oppress”, “revolt” and “rebel” appear, direct echoes of the popular uprisings that shook Santiago between 2018 and 2020.

Finally, the exhibition concludes in the basement with a section dedicated to his artistic intervention for the Villejuif – Gustave Roussy station of the Grand Paris Express, scheduled to open in the summer of 2026. Models, sketches, and prototypes trace nearly a decade of reflection, in close collaboration with architect Dominique Perrault. This offers an insight into the behind-the-scenes workings, where art and urbanism converge to rethink and re-enchant the public space of Paris including works such as The Milky Way, Lepton II, Waves and Polka.