Jeremias "Jerry" Elizalde Navarro (1924 - 1999)
The Silver Golden Machine
signed and dated 1957 (lower left and verso)
shaped norwegian pine
38" x 48" x 3" (97 cm x 122 cm x 8 cm)


Accompanied by a certificate issued by Mrs. Emma Navarroconfirming the authenticity of this lot


LITERATURE:Reyes, Cid. J. Elizalde Navarro. National Museum of the Philippines.Manila. 2008. Page 104 with a full-color illustration on page 105.

In 1957, then-33-year-old Jerry Elizalde Navarro was invited by the Japanese chapter of the Youth Association of Asia to visit the 'Land of the Rising Sun.' Fascinated with the country's culture, Navarro began to assimilate Japanese aesthetics into his art. In the succeeding year, Navarro held a one-man exhibition of his paintings at the Mitsukoshi Art Gallery in Tokyo. The Youth Association of Asia sponsored the show. In the midst of the pervading influence Japanese aesthetics had brought upon Navarro's creative intelligence, he would start exploring the machine and related imagery. In 1957, he produced The Silver Golden Machine, which Cid Reyes described as a "relief using shaped Norwegian pine." The work at hand depicts a fully functioning machine's rough yet dynamic structure and movement. Here, Navarro presents the well-calculated elegance of the mechanical apparatus. During this period, when Navarro dabbled between two distinctive art forms, the circle remained a recurring figure. Reyes writes in J. Elizalde Navarro: "The significance of the circle in Navarro is of paramount importance, its meaning possibly dredged from the artist's unconscious. By his own admission, the circle was, from the start, some sort of a fetish. "I am crazy about the circle," he has always said. The circle, after all, is the perfect shape, a line that has journeyed in a trajectory and has arrived at a point where it started, thus evoking a sense of completeness, as in the phrase "coming full circle." Eventually, Navarro would experience a full circle artistic journey. He would ultimately go back to abstraction, albeit in a more exuberant and dynamic form, during the twilight of his artistic career and the last years of his earthly life. As Rod. Paras-Perez had written, abstraction would become Navarro's "motif and content-bearer." (A.M.)