Iván Navarro's Nowhere Man Series at Galerie Daniel Templon

Iván Navarro (born 1972), who represented Chile at the 2009 Venice Biennale, presented his third exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris from September 5 to October 24, 2009. The show featured the series Nowhere Man, in which Navarro uses neon—his signature material—to reinterpret pictograms originally designed by German graphic designer Otl Aicher for the 1972 Munich Olympics. The pictograms depict sports such as swimming, water polo, basketball, handball, and boxing through simple lines and circles, relying on basic perceptual psychology. Navarro enlarges them to human scale, making the schematic figures more lifelike. The title references the Beatles song of the same name, previously used in an earlier work. The series pays homage to stateless people and exiles, a condition familiar to Chileans who fled the Pinochet regime. Navarro's work often alludes to the dictatorship's atrocities and the death penalty, as seen in his Death Corridors at the Chilean pavilion in Venice—glass doors opening onto a false perspective created by mirrors and lights—and his neon electric chairs inspired by Gerrit Rietveld's design. While the Nowhere Men maintain the contrast between minimalist coolness and horrific themes, they differ from earlier works by explicitly depicting the body, which previously appeared only as a ghostly absence in spaces like illusory empty corridors or fragile electrified chairs.