La influencia de Györg Kepes en la obra temprana de Juan Navarro Baldeweg realizada en el Center for Advanced Visual Studies del MIT (1971-1975)

Abstract

The work of Juan Navarro Baldeweg carried out during the first years of his professional career at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reveals the basis of his principles and the main ideas that have been present in his work throughout his life. He has acknowledged the strongest influence that had on his work the years that he spent at the CAVS, with explicit reference to some of the artists with whom he worked and specially mentioning the impact of György kepes on his understanding of the world as a ‘ coherent landscape’ and on his approaching to the perception of the physical environment. The present article tries to show the above mentioned influences, claimed by him several times but not deeply studied in depth up to the moment. A look at the work carried out by Navarro Baldeweg during his professional career reveals his adscription to the theoretical concepts explored during these years: his desire to apprehend the reality using a variety of artistic media and his interest to show all his works sharing the same place, something that is present already in this first stage of his career at which he used different materials and media. Also, he shows a permanent interest to go deeply into the knowledge of the physical reality, through the relationship between the individual and the space that surrounds him; his search of a conceptual structure that has allows him to understand the urban and architectural space, thanks to a coordinate system based on essential variables intimately related to the individual and the manifestation of a mental space associated with the physical reality, materialized so often since then through subtle mechanisms in his paintings, installations and architectural projects, that impress directly on the human senses and incite to the participation of the individual in the definition of this complementary space.