ART

Alexander Duvernard Navarro

Bloomsburg University of Arts

It is good to see an artist literally cutting himself down to size. Alexander Duvernard Navarro's recent paintings, large in scale and executed in Day-Glo, metallic paints posturing pinks, Astroturf greens, blaring oranges, have positively screamed out at us from the walls of Bloomsburg's gallery.

" My work was never culture specific." says the Mexican artist. " My culture, in fact, is universal. I grew up in a rural area with traditional Mexican culture, but I woke up every morning to American music playing on the transistor radio."

Side by side with the painting has come a great deal of self-conscious art theorizing, linking his preoccupations with such figures as Foucault and Baudrillanrd. It is work that bedazzles, but that also seems too brilliantly mechanical, too relentlessly urban.

An estimate of 137 paintings were created between December 5, 2000 and April 19, 2001. The gallerist Heinz Holtman from the Philadelphia Museum of Arts, selected half of these paintings for the annual Philadelphia Regional Fines Arts Festival viewed at Nexus each spring.

Alexander Duvernard Navarro, second place at the Philadelphia Regional Fines Arts Festival, and third place at the Bloomsburg University of Arts, had give him a brilliant opportunity to join the Metropolitan Art College in Boston Mass.

Alexander was born in Cancun Mexico on April 20, 1978, when he was 3 years old, his family moved to Cuernavaca Morelos Mexico, a place where the art and poetry takes place, and at the age of 7 alexander and his family moved to the USA, " Allentown Pa " they went to live with his aunt Rosa and cousins,

" everything was different, new, the smell of a new country, the people walking on the streets, different languages, " says alex, he went to school at Harrison Morton middle school, then at Dieruff High School, where he graduated on June 16, 1996.

November 1997, Alex went to the New York Institute of Photography and graduated on September 12, 1999, then on November 1999, Alexander have decided to become an artist and join the Bloomsburg University of Arts.

Alexander also wants to go to Madrid Spain to join the University of Federico Garcia Lorca, to learn about poetry and be a writer.

_Elizabeth Kley