Miquel Navarro trained at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia and began by painting works of an expressionist character, but from the seventies onwards he devoted himself exclusively to sculpture, feeling the need to work with volume.

Starting in 1974 he built hundreds of simple geometric figures which he arranged in groups on the ground, constructing spectacular cities with buildings, avenues, neighbourhoods and factories, suffused with an atmosphere of absence and timelessness which gave them a dramatic character. In these compositions he included some phallic vertical elements which became landmarks alluding to the human figure. In the late eighties these vertical figures began to take on greater importance and turned into independent pieces, forming suggestive sculptures.

Cantell is a clear example of this formal evolution. It is a set of cylindrical shapes rising out of the ground, composed of an inverted truncated cone figure on which two elements are arranged, one of them like a hut and the other like a chimney, which in Navarro’s art often represents the human head.