Ivan Navarro, Concentration Camp, at Roebling Hall

The sculpture starts the moment you walk in the art gallery. It runs down the hallways and around the walls on the first two galleries but I think that the real attention grabber is this awkward huge, clumsy wheelbarrow. What connects the sculpture on the wall and this wheelbarrow in the idea of labor though, which is something that you do not really notice in this pattern here that runs around the walls. It looks like a Greek freeze or something kind of pretty and pastel colored.

Given the fact that I am in Navarro’s past sculptures have included a table with lights that form swastika and a brief case that includes names of people killed by the Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet. It should come as no surprise that there is more than this piece that meets the eye. From the middle of the wall it is hard to tell what this sculpture represents once you make out the head and the rest of the body though and you know that the title is called crawling you could make sense of this whole room as a serious of crawling figures.

This shows title Concentration Camp makes the most sense in the back gallery though maybe it does not have the degree of menace that Navarro would like. In the corner it looks like one of the crawling figures that is trying to sneak away, front and center between two electric chairs a back board and hoop called no dunking refer to the method of torture. Is this the torture chamber? Because I do not associate basketball with this kind of dark theme, it is also strange to see chairs resembling famous 20th century designs in this context. Even if I guess technically they could electrocute you.

This chair is base on a chair by designer Marcel Brower who was inspired by Gary Ritfeld in the 1920s and Ritfeld also designed this zigzag chair in 1934. And Ivan Navarro incidentally made a living as a terrorist store when he moved to New York about ten years ago now he lives off of his art work. But you can still see the influence of modernist furniture and design in his work. Still there is no denying the thrill of looking at Navarro’s work, it strongly recalls sculpture by minimalist Dan Flavin a pioneer of fluorescent lighting in sculpture in the 60s but by harnessing both of fear and the beauty inheriting his medium Navarro breaths new life into it and makes it his own.


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