A 6-meter-long and 4-meter-high installation stretches across the exhibition space, held together by 740 ropes and composed of eight thousand coal fragments. It rises like a giant, dark constellation, a star drawn in shadow that fills the room with a palpable quiet. The texture of silence becomes a visible presence, turning the gallery into a landscape where form, weight, and absence coexist with deliberate calm.
This marks Alicante’s first major show by Navarro, a Doctor of Fine Arts who has long preferred working in silence and letting the works speak for themselves. The prior project carried the single word Silence, and the current presentation, titled Texture of Silence, continues the meditation on stillness. As the artist describes the process, the piece unfolds as a practice of meditation, repetition, and accumulation of elements that yield a body of work with a strong physical and conceptual resonance. The project has been developing since 2016, gathering material and method into a cohesive, intimate language of material presence.
Navarro uses non-noble materials and embraces the raw character of coal, paper, and methacrylate. He collects these materials to reverse hierarchies in art and to transform their everyday nature into sculptural and architectural propositions. The artist describes how repetition functions as a deliberate act, creating new dimensions from repeated gestures. Small fragments of coal, attached or suspended from larger structures, stand as evidence of the accumulation that gives weight to the whole installation. Black, the dominant color, is treated as a language in itself: neutral yet potent, all-encompassing and almost magical in its ability to absorb light and form.
In this exhibit, curated by Gertrud Gómez, the grand black spot is suspended in space and extends across a five-meter polyptych, complemented by thirty smaller works arranged within the Tabarca and Luceros chambers. The overall installation invites a dialogue between scale, texture, and tempo, where each component contributes to a larger rhythmic pattern. The combination of a sweeping central element and a constellation of smaller pieces creates a landscape of shadows and surface that encourages prolonged looking and physical engagement with the room.