Self-Portraits: Inigo Navarro

Unlike most people, I have no trouble admitting that I enjoy talking about myself. However, dear art addict, I do not intend to bore you with an unemployment-office resume going on about whether I won this or that prize or exhibited who knows where. I am fed up with the stench of the contemporary thing that pushes artists to fit into a multinational machinery where the politically correct (including its incorrectness) and bureaucratic merits triumph.

I am more into the revelry, the classic style of the suburban artist, witty and degenerate, spawned in a fishmonger’s and whose school is the street, all in a theoretical way of course.

 

  

“Escena encantadora en la provenza”

To train myself I have consulted oracles in trench coats, mediums who shared little offices with court-appointed lawyers, ticket touts and suitcases, needy divorcees, underworld accountants, professional small-time dealers, hangers-on and bigots, marquises with grease stains, Carrefour shelf-stockers, the odd officer of the forces of order and, in short, anyone who has something even minimally interesting to tell. 

I differ diametrically with those who think that art resides in twee formal discussions, intellectual, affected and unfading. I am into the cod and that beautiful route to Valencia full of delinquents and misfortune.

 

  

“Amantes del rovellons ante su hallazgo de vestigios aztecas”

 

I know these ravings are dangerous; my regular phrenologist insists that  I should not aim so high, he assures me that my head has the morphology of a coachman, and that this business of being an artist is too much for someone like me. My mother agrees with the diagnosis. What is more, when at night Mindi and I put the children to bed, the “nag nag” of conscience becomes unbearable to me, and amid sobs I swear before God and my family nucleus to vainly pledge that first thing in the morning I will be another man, better, much more solvent and with a terrible urge to die of boredom in a normal job.

It is a pity that this only lasts me until I read the back page of the As and the brief biopic of the day’s hottie. The slyness typical of the people’s senate, the bar, intoxicates me, the effluvia of the torrent of life drag me along and when I want to realize it I am betting with my cousin the Pole at a traffic light on the color of the next car that will stop. 

 

  

“Extraño suceso en Mataró”

If the bad conscience takes hold of me again, I re-comb my hair with saliva and drag myself to ask for money from my relatives and friends to produce a definitive work that I promise will turn us all into millionaires and owners of a development of terraced houses in “Marina D’Or”. 

Sometimes, certain art agents feel the temptation to encourage me, whether by buying or by exhibiting  my work. It is regrettable that the fatality of fate is so contagious. I feel like Attila’s horse. The unwary who help me  go bankrupt, get divorced or have trials and win them. 

 

  

 “Funcionarios de la Generalitat representando el saqueo de Bizancio el día de la Diada”

 

On my enlightened days I pilgrimage on my knees to the doorway of my building, I get up to reach the elevator button and when Mindi, attentive to the bell, opens the door, I speak to her in this way:

-Oh Mindi my dear, exuberant wife, hush, let me speak, I am a damned one, similar to those that Henry Miller described in his “Tropic of Capricorn”, or was that Bukowski? It does not matter. Damned was Cervantes, who they said was one-handed although he was not, or Gongora and the nose he dragged along, deaf Goya, bald Picasso. My love, does it not comfort you, the idea that when our children ingest the indigestible cardboard they are forging the legend of royalties whose profitability will have no parallel?  Will it not be our sacrifice, yes Mindi, yours and mine, the two of us, the necessary immolation of two martyrs in exchange for eternity and the sponsorship of our subsidiaries? Embrace me, my life.

 

  

“Infancia de un contable”

 

Amid plaintive sobs we wipe away each other’s tears and wring them out in the bathtub to save water.

Anyway, there is little more to tell, the same old story, boy meets girl, girl discovers him  in bed with a Doberman, etcetera… 

I hope this faithful tale has fired up the heart of the most recalcitrant investor and that he finds in my misfortune his business. 

 

  

“Jurado de miss Tarragona en bikini”

 

All that remains for me to say is that the “Contrast” gallery in Barcelona has seen fit to organize an exhibition for me next autumn where I will deploy all my narrative arsenal and clinical eye. After a possession ritual, I will go up the Ebro river in the body of an orthodontist from Badalona surnamed Barrufet, all documented in a series of oil paintings whose precision will, no doubt, remind you of the great masters.

 

  

“Un Navarro de Reus”

 

 “Rogativa por el seny”

 

“Amantes del rovellons ante su hallazgo de vestigios aztecas”

“Monserrat”

 

“Gerente de la central de Vandellós”

 

Contact details: http://www.inigonavarro.es

 

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