May 11 to June 2

Mario Navarro

The New Ideal Line

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My work has been developed mainly from fragile materials, low priced, with very little weight and, as a consequence of this, easily moved and installed. I have worked with different materials and techniques, such as mural charcoal drawings, sculptures, videos and public interventions which have always had an independent sense of being a new object. For some time now, all my work has been produced under a single idea, which sums up and exemplifies my way of producing art: The New Ideal Line. The New Ideal Line was originally the title of an early XX. Century cartoon published in the catalogue for the exhibition “Cartoons About Modern Art” (Tate Gallery, London 1973). The meaning that I have assigned to this phrase is specifically connected to the form taken by the “illusory” deployment of promises for the overcoming of underdevelopment and an immediate access to the modernity of the first world that Chile has adopted since the early nineties, the period of postdictatorship. The New Ideal Line (T.N.I.L.) shall then be the alleged way, the future, the modern. My reply to all these promises is based on their permanent incapacity to overcome even the smallest, individual and subjective obstacle, rendering visible the instability and periodical breaks in its massive rectilinear trajectory. T.N.I.L. is an opportunity for making the layout more flexible, adding connections, both parallel and transversal, specially conceived to fracture its origins. Therefore, The New Ideal Line works against itself, against its sources and against its origins. This is, in sum, the ideal line: a political negotiation and an agreed way.

The work of Mario Navarro is a political and identitary investigation into his own living environment. One example is his project on the 1970's car Chevrolet Opala, too expensive for ordinary people but a symbol of the police and security agencies, and beyond this of the social and political weakening caused by the Chilean dictatorial machinery. One of his public projects also consisted of a temporary radio station based in a mobile home, aiming at creating links between political, community-related and artistic values. For his recent exhibition Mario Navarro built a red container placed on a rotating axe. The container itself, imprisoned within its own absurd momentum, also evokes the permanent movement of the thousands of similar structures throughout the world. One of his new works deals with the cybernetic approach to organization and regulation of social economy from the Seventies in the period of the dictatorship in Chile.

Mario Navarro, born in 1970, lives in Santiago de Chile. Teaches at Facultad de Artes—Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago de Chile.

Jens Kastner is a sociologist and art historian. He teaches at the Center of Latin American Studies at the University of Muenster.