Sin título [Untitled]
Meteoros, aparatos y vórtices [Meteors, Devices and Vortices] (2015)
Digital print on paper
62 x 92.5 cm framed
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2015.305.1
Francisco Navarrete Sitja spent weeks, months as a nocturnal explorer of the Basque industrial terrain to reflect – based on patience and light – the ‘ghostly’ image of a mindset of an indefinite temporal nature.
Acting as a sniper, immersed in nature and hidden by the shadows of the night, the Chilean artist faithfully recorded an extreme landscape in which, in the midst of an almost paradisical nature, the immemorial is contaminated by industrial architectures that awaken us to the threat of a sinister future.
That overlapping – as the artist himself points out – of ‘reality and fiction, the tangible and intangible, the natural and artificial, the local and the global, provokes a formal speculation on certain historical narratives associated with landscape and collective life’. In the case of this image, which belongs to the ‘Meteoros, aparatos y vórtices’ [Meteors, Devices and Vortices] series, nature disappears from the plane to recreate a structure that becomes symbolic since, historically, technology and industry seem to have been fundamental to the very Basque identity of the Bizkaia of our time.
Even though it is not so noticeable in this work, the atmospheric and cinematographic aspects in the work of Navarrete Sitja gleam in a discourse that pivots around an emotion: uncertainty. That, and nothing else, is clear from the vision of this ship adrift yet anchored at an unspecific time.
Francisco Navarrete Sitja (Chile, 1986) graduated in Plastic Arts and has a Master’s Degree in Visual Arts from Chile University. Navarrete’s art reflects on contemplation, temporal nature and subjectivity of the image and depiction of the territory.