120th anniversary of Navarro Ramón

The man from Altea rubbed shoulders with Picasso and Miró and exhibited with them in the pavilion of the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1937 his work "We Will Avenge You", considered as "the Valencian Guernica"

Born in 1903 on the slopes of Altea, a small, whitewashed town in Alicante that clings to the steps of a mountain and struggles to climb to its highest point, Juan Navarro Ramón always looked to his hometown, the Mediterranean, and its light as his guiding lights. His long artistic career began with his training in Valencia, continued in Madrid, and later in Barcelona, ​​where, at only twenty-two years old, he won First Prize for Painting.

The Civil War caught Navarro Ramón in the Republican zone, which he represented at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris alongside Picasso's Guernica , Joan Miró's The Reaper , and works by Julio González. Navarro Ramón attended the exposition regularly until 1962.

The work "We Will Avenge You" by Navarro Ramón, considered by Professor Joan Borja as "The Valencian Guernica", was exhibited in 2018 at the Palau Altea.

Although Navarro Ramón's paintings have been exhibited in prestigious museums such as the Reina Sofía and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and have traveled to galleries in Argentina, France, Germany, Belgium, and England, the artist always felt indifferent toward the paths to success. Navarro Ramón believed that his work should speak for itself and that any self-respecting painter should forbid himself from making self-promotional statements. As art critic Carlos Areán pointed out, Navarro Ramón was often invited to participate in covert publicity campaigns where simply exhibiting his canvases wouldn't have been enough; he would have had to seduce the public. Navarro Ramón always refused to be the protagonist of such schemes. He remained the same quiet, unassuming, hardworking, and humble man in his public life, placing little importance on the market value of his paintings, whose sales allowed him to live comfortably, without extravagance but also without hardship.

Picasso, Fujita, Zadkine and Navarro Ramón in the fifties

Navarro Ramón's life unfolded within himself. Altea, the French Riviera and Roussillon, where he went into exile after the Spanish Civil War, and Sitges, where he died, were the inspirations for his life and his painting, intrinsically linked. His canvases convey a bittersweet feeling where beauty, anguish over the passage of time, and nostalgia intertwine, without suggesting that any past era was better. Carlos Areán explained that, like Picasso, "beneath the characteristics of the artistic trend to which Navarro Ramón adheres at any given time, there is a recognizable personal stamp in the nuances of color, in the rhythms of the arabesques, and in the creation of an atmosphere that clearly distinguishes him from any other artist."

Juan Navarro Ramón - Collioure (1939)

Mediterranean and sensual, nothing in Navarro Ramón's canvases is forced or imposed. The fluidity of the forms is similar to that of Kandinsky after 1910 or Tharrats at Dau al Set from 1950 onwards, giving us the impression that the work has not yet reached its definitive structure and that, like the skies of Altea, with their sparse clouds that are constantly forming and dissolving without ever releasing their rain, it will change the instant after we contemplate it. Nothing is permanent in these loose structures, and each one seems not so much a frozen slice in time, but rather one of the many images in a film that we will never be able to retain, detached from the preceding one and the one that will follow.

Juan Navarro Ramón - Landscape of Altea III.

 

See more works by Juan Navarro Ramón