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.

In the case of Bocetos en abanicos, Miquel Navarro makes the most of the qualities of this particular support to create different motifs on various sections of the leaf. These sketches seem to depict modules of what might be one of the artist’s cities, or perhaps industrial elements. For Miquel Navarro, similarly to many other artists, the sketch is an initial element in which to begin to work out an idea, but here it is interesting to see that it is the main motif itself, as if by unfurling the fan we were unfolding the whole creative process.