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, solitude, and also, as the artist himself has confessed, power.

These pieces were painted for the exhibition Otros abanicos (Other Fans), promoted by Fundación Banco Exterior de España and held in 1985 at its exhibition hall in Madrid, which featured European fans and Chinesepai-pais decorated by twenty-nine artists.

Celebrated above all for his facet as a sculptor, Navarro’s output also embraces painting and drawing. In these two works he makes masterful use of the particular support, a Japanese fan with straight lines and paper leaf: the more painterly Ciudad de cactus and Bocetos en abanicos, which is closer to the preparatory drawings the artist usually makes as the first step towards his sculptures, or, in other cases, as independent works in their own right.

Ciudad de cactus connects with Navarro’s works in acrylic in the seventies and eighties, sharing many points in common. The strong orange colour, customary in his creations, represents a symbolic city. His interest in the subject matter of the city is part of the artist’s imaginary ever since his childhood and is consubstantial to his production, tying in at times with constructivist theories, the metaphysical cities of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and the theories of neo-rationalist architecture of

 Tendenza 

an Italian architecture group founded in the sixties and led by the architect Aldo Rossi. Its goal was to renew architecture, the driving force for a new model of city planning in which the collective memory is reflected.

. Furthermore, in this work one can also intuit signs of the influence of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. A dreamlike universe based on the concept of the postmodern city.