Iván Navarro views his work as building upon the unresolved aspects of minimalism, striving to engage viewer interaction and highlight the social and political factors that inherently lie within formal composition. Utilizing the aesthetic purity of fluorescent light bulbs, his White Electric Chair reveals a chilling menace in its sensitivity as a design object. Modelled on the famed Rietveld chair, and in effect also posing as fashionable furniture, Navarro’s un-sittable sculpture undermines the authoritative qualities of its ergonomic construction, while also referring the death-dealing jolt of the electric chairs memorably memorialized in Andy Warhol’s series. Apparently unaware of the risks involved, a perhaps dim-witted visitor actually sat in another example of this work when displayed at the Miami Basel art fair, shattering the bulbs and walking away (more or less) with embedded glass shards.
