Juan Viscarret Navaz

JUAN VISCARRET NAVAZ (Pamplona, 1910 - Caracas, 1990).
"Still life".
Oil on canvas.
Signed and dated in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 60 x 73 cm; 80 x 95 x 5 cm (frame).

Still life resolved with great technical rigor and careful attention to the material qualities. The composition is organized on a dark and reflecting surface in which food and daily objects are arranged, treated with a strong sense of volume and weight. The lighting, directed and restrained, enhances the textures and creates subtle hallmarks between light and shadow, evoking the tradition of the Spanish still life of baroque roots reinterpreted from a contemporary sensibility. The palette, dominated by ochers, earths and deep reds, brings unity and sobriety to the whole.

Juan Viscarret Navaz was a Spanish-Venezuelan painter trained at the School of Arts and Crafts in Pamplona, where he began an early and solid artistic career. After exhibiting in Navarre and the south of France in the early 1930s, he went into exile in Venezuela during the Spanish Civil War, where he lived for the rest of his life and where he fully developed his work.

Throughout his career he participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and received important awards and recognitions, especially in Mérida and Caracas. He produced more than five hundred works and his legacy was recognized posthumously with anthological exhibitions, a gallery with his name and a monument in his honor in the city of Mérida.