Amuleto

AMULET, GLASS ORGANISMS

In the creation of her works, Ana Navas has used diverse materials, from fabrics and metals to wood, plastics, and paper. In the 2014 exhibition A Veil as a Gaze at the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, she incorporated glass into her creations. The exhibition we are now discussing, Amuleto, at Crisis Gallery, Lima, offers a second phase of her work with this fragile material.

In the pieces that comprise Amulet, the artist uses glass as both a support and a working material: glass on glass. This amalgamation is technically risky because it requires passing the pieces through a high-temperature kiln twice—a technique called glass-fusion—and as Ana commented, “You only know what you’ve done at the end of the process, when the work has cooled and you remove it from the kiln.” Fire has contributed to the creation of these unique pieces. Navas, in a gesture of humility toward her materials, has allowed the temperature to provide the final polish to her creations, and the result is that each piece displays a creative identity—that of Ana Navas—and a kind of hybrid, sensual beauty, born from the controlled melting of the glass in the kiln.

But nothing would be beautiful or sensual without the work prior to melting, without the artist’s marks and intentions, her hand visible in the contours of the works, in the colors and composition of the fragments. Navas has a special talent for expressing strange and compelling things visually. I pause, for example, at the work titled Destello [gleam] and need to linger before it. Destello asks me to observe it slowly, and I begin my ekphrasis—a detailed description of a work of art—with the transparent center, in which irregular gray cubes float, forming a series of circles that expand toward the edges and are lost beneath the lines that establish the contour, dominated by various shades of blue, green, and watery brown. Wait for a moment. At the core of the gleam, there is something else: a tiny mosaic of vivid colors, and to its left, four fine lines that draw an irregular square even smaller than the mosaic. Destello is the aesthetic sum of these and other fragments, a sum that results in an active object, a glass organism. For the artist, this (and each) organism emerges from the metabolization of key references in her fascination with the close relationship between the pioneers of modern abstraction and spirituality. Thus, the piece fuses both glimpses of works by artists such as Hilma af Klint, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as the diverse sources that inspired them, including symbolism, ethnography, and theosophy.

Ana Navas, while studying art, found abstract painting in search of her own expression and combined it with the recycling of everyday objects, both domestic and commercial. In a conversation with Marisol Rodríguez in May 2021, she noted: “In general, my work is inspired by how past works of art and art movements influence and circulate outside of their own contexts.” This brief statement shows us the path she has followed, because for an artist like Navas, saying “out of context” is equivalent to creating her own contexts. On the one hand, there is abstraction, that is, the non-figurative response to expressive desire, and on the other, everyday reality, including the use of abstract art patterns in fashion and advertising. Ana Navas has reflected on this complex intersection of art and everyday life in exhibitions such as Zigzag & other Ws (2022) at Sperling, Munich, and the aforementioned A veil as a Gaze (2024) in Amsterdam. Abstraction and its spiritual sources are very present in the works gathered in Amulet, but the references to the everyday are subtle, blurred by the effect of fire on the glass.

My interpretation of Destello is personal, and I believe that other viewers will form their own mental composition of this work and any of the others in Amulet. We are always alone before a work of art. Something notable about this new work by Ana Navas is that it grants freedom to the viewer: it is a creative work that invites creative collaboration in its meaning; the viewer recreates the object before them and, in their own way, makes it their own. This liberating effect of the relationship between work and viewer enriches the spirit—an amulet is made to bring good—which is saying something in the times we live in, where most of the images circulating serve preconceived messages to close spaces and control our sensibilities.

Ricardo Cuadros.
Amsterdam, March 2025.

The pieces were produced at MAKE Eindhoven.