“Art can produce new messages,” he says. But he warns: ‘The danger is that they are not messages to anyone’
Juan Navarro Baldeweg (Santander, 1939) walks through the Marlborough Gallery in Madrid, where he now exhibits his collection ‘Then and today’. A raw light, typical of a bleak sunny day, seeps through the skylights of some rooms. A light that gives a special glow to some paintings, which in some cases he has made with his hands, without a brush, and in other cases allows the law of gravity and other physical phenomena to shape the composition. Navarro Baldeweg was first a painter and then an architect and won the National Prize for Visual Arts a quarter of a century before that for Architecture. Despite his brilliant career, his many competitions won and his teaching prestige at the School, he is again more of a painter than an architect. Both works, the intimate and limitless with the canvas, and the more technical, conditioned and needing a team to perform it, with the planes, are inextricably linked in his head. It is observed in his work and is confirmed in the detailed explanations he gives for each of his paintings, in how he specifies his handling of space, light and shadows and the very physical nature of some of the works.
– He first studied engraving at the School of Fine Arts and then did architecture to earn a living, he once said. He did not choose an easy career.
– Since then I was interested in art in general, while in Santander I got my hands on the books of the Altamira School. There I saw that there was no difference between the arts. And then it was clear to me that I was going to study an artistic career. I started painting and in fact I did my first exhibition right away when I started my career at the School of Architecture. When I finished, I worked on urban planning and other issues, went to MIT in Massachusetts on a Juan March Foundation scholarship and there I was in close contact with all the artistic disciplines because we lived together painters, musicians, photographers …
– What was he doing there?
– I worked with coordinates that are essential to bring them to the surface. Since then I’ve been talking about light and creating landscapes in architecture, for example through overhead lighting. I try to show the connections between all that. The organic and the forces that surround us is what characterizes my work.
– Are we dealing with an architect-painter or a painter-architect?
– It’s not easy to answer that. Gravity and light, which are essential in architecture, are characteristic of painting. The first monument in history, a stone on another stone, is something pure gravity. And that is also in the painting. Therefore, it is difficult to know which comes first. There are works that arise from the figurative of certain landscapes. As I said, the penetration of a sunbeam into a landscape, something so evident in painting, can be created in architecture by means of a cover that allows light to pass through at certain times.
dreams and reality
– Does painting make you dream and does architecture force you to keep your feet on the ground?
– Architecture has much more annoying aspects and painting is much freer. At least now we’re not forced to paint the kings. But it is true that the emotion of the organic is preserved. Painting has influenced my career as an architect and vice versa.
– And the market doesn’t condition painting?
– I enjoyed the freedom because I didn’t have to live on painting. That allowed me to experiment, to do what I wanted. And I’ve changed my way of doing things over the years.
– On the other hand, in his facet as an architect, he had to fight with the administrations, for competitions won that were not developed later, lawsuits during construction…
– They were painful things that meant a lot of wear and tear. But I don’t want to talk about those differences of opinion. They are things of the past. Art is something magical, wondrous and therefore more demanding than others.
– There is another aspect: in the painting you are alone. Many teams are needed in architecture, especially in the construction phase. How did you deal with that dependence?
– In that sense, architecture can be equated with cinema. It costs a lot and moves a lot of people. The painting as I made it is very simple, but deep down it is more demanding. Think the ‘handless painting’ I often do, as seen in this exhibition, is perhaps the most primitive. Ultimately, what matters is that art can produce new messages. The danger that the messages are not to anyone.
– And thus?
– We create the expectation that what we do is valid for someone. You have to decipher reality because sometimes it tells you things you cannot understand. It is something that often depends on your prejudices.
– The painting that gives you so much freedom is unknown to many people who have seen your buildings instead, where you had more restrictions. What feelings does that give you?
– It may happen that an architectural work is indeed much more famous than a painting, but that does not mean that one understands the origin and raison d’être of that work. Sometimes the value of works is something they acquire over time. Or that it disappears, which can also happen. Architecture is the most fragile of all the arts because many hands are involved.
– And because nature and time often destroy buildings or are demolished to make way for others.
– To build is to destroy. It’s not something new. Nature always does. But there will be more reconversion, more recycling of buildings because it is getting easier. If some technical changes are made, you can live much better in an old house than in a modern house. The raison d’être, the aesthetics, the origin of a building can survive. There are parts that are still valid centuries later. It looks great in Italian cities.
– And what happens to those additions to the buildings? Are you in favor of going back to the original form or respecting what has been done over time?
– It depends on the quality of what has been added. Factors that intervene that must be linked to those elements that change. There is always a reason for everything: preservation or change. Think that in a house the dishwasher is replaced and that does not result in any essential change. Well, the same in buildings. And the same thing happens with words: some are very static, others change over time.
– And with what was damaged by natural causes or wars? Has it been rebuilt identically or will new buildings be put in its place?
– You can live with very current values in a more classical context and vice versa. Then there are the connections to the world, and this is where environmental factors come into play.
– Some architects are said to try to create sculptures instead of buildings. What do you think?
– There may be exemplary works in the sense that they are creators of language. The classical foundations of architecture lasted for many centuries. Everything was defined in its basic aspects and the proportions hardly changed. Then there comes a point where that stops working and the transformation starts from the lower levels. You can be nihilistic in the sense of accepting languages made in different circumstances.
– As a teacher for many years you will have noticed: do young architects nowadays go more for the artistic side or for the practical side?
– As I said, a building is not justified as architecture or as a purely artistic work, unless it is exemplary in the articulation of certain elements. But that happens very rarely. I don’t think such a thing should be useful. Well, I’ve told you before that sometimes the problem is in the words. For centuries we have called a tree an entity that is connected to the ground, the sky, the rain… something that has no end, a living being that makes connections with everything around it. The ecological problem would be easier to understand if we had other words. We are very watertight in concepts. We must facilitate the connection between the factors that intervene in our world. We have to deal with and communicate with new languages.
– Did you ever say that architecture does not order the world, but makes it visible? And the painting?
– Architecture, when it makes connections with its environment, is easier to understand. My painting is also related to external and internal forces. Therefore, it has the sense of complementarity, of that movement, of palpitations, of making us feel more transparent.
– He also wrote and even made the cover of an album…
– Yes, one from Radio Futura.
– Would you like to do other things? More album covers, theater or opera sets?
– I really liked what I did. I’ve never had any doubts.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
