- Sep 3

Angela Navarro

Written by Kristen T. Woodward, curator, MFA, professor of art, Albright College.

Angela Navarro began her artistic journey in media art and design with a Bauhausian approach favoring simplicity. Her exhibition record for painting now stretches to galleries in Texas, Washington State, and San Juan Island. Recent exhibit venues in Seattle include Sparklebarn, Ballard Works, and the Waterworks Gallery. Angela has participated in The Other Art Fair in Dallas and other notable projects in Texas including installations at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, the San Antonio Art League & Museum, and the Austin Studio Tour. Her work has additionally been featured in contemporary arts journals such as TRIBEZA – The Art Issue and Austin’s EASTside Magazine.

Boldly contrasting abstractions push and pull the viewer between rhythmic order and emotional chaos. Ribbon-like passageways weave through curvilinear shapes in her large-scale canvases, suggesting meandering trails on country maps. Circular motifs sooth frequent directional shifts in her linear markings, and occasionally small painterly moments escape the overarching sweep of her larger strokes. Describing herself as a colorist, Angela’s palette maintains a keen equilibrium between warm and cool hues. Pink and blue geometric designs unflinchingly merge with organic, achromatic figurations. Reminiscent of textiles as well as botanical elements, Angela’s designs do not repeat as much as they echo altered versions of themselves within a single arrangement. Interstices of empty white space provide visual rest in her paintings, and sometimes suggest a more traditional figure-ground relationship through the buildup of larger configurations within compositions.

Chalkpaint and industrial pigments create a distinctively unified and matt surface in her recent mixed media works. The softness of the paint film methodically counters the hard shape edges, and the pigment tints most of the dominant hues in her work towards pastel. Viewers may detect aesthetic concerns recalling the Pattern & Decoration movement, such as an interest in a flattened grid.

Angela states she is “thematically inspired by the quotidian, and I make sure I bring my sense of humor along.” Walking Up and Down my Neighborhood with my Dog (Dog Not Included) (pictured above) embraces these edicts, and then some. Small dots and dashes add visual levity to the 46-inch square canvas, while creamy white bars and squiggles queue in lopsided rows. Olive and emerald shapes breaking through flat and winding planes invoke plots of grass in an urban neighborhood, particularly when viewed in context of the painting’s title and other titles which reference parks, and pastoral terrain. Walking Up and Down exerts a grounded steadiness, as the forms are distributed evenly across the space. In related paintings, thin white lines offer the contrary sensation, they are tenuously suspending heavier color blocks.

Angela Navarro’s paintings may conjure mental maps and physical pathways. An intrepid, haptic process becomes revealed through the robust physicality of her paint. Clearly, expressions of joy are present in her exuberant works. However, Angela also leaves us with traces of paths not taken in the final visual field. Tubular conduits are crossed over, and lines loop back onto themselves. As in life, courses which once seemed certain are inexorably corrected. Rather than exposing wavering faith in her designs, her edits expose intuitive and conflicting choices left bare. The honesty of her artistic method remains laid out in totality for us, allowing viewers to experience her paintings on the same pure, exploratory level from which they were made.