SÁNCHEZ NAVARRO
Vicente Sanchez Navarro (Alicante, 1926). He is a painter and a draftsman. He is specialized in taurine themes, which he creates with a simple style, very bright and with an Impressionist touch. He stands out for his solo exhibitions in the halls of the Nacional Publishing House (1976) and Trazos (1987), Madrid; Mutua Unión Patronal of Alicante (1987) and he also participated in several group exhibitions.
He has been a quiet artist, keeping a low profile even in the art world itself, preferring to be in his workshop located in Alicante among brushes and color tubes .
He has painted bright, sunny landscapes, religious subjects, evangelical, boats in Arenales del Sol, meadows with olive and carob trees. This painter has managed to capture the essence-the "suc"- about which Gabriel Miró spoke - of his habitats, perched on the top of a canyon or behind the barrier of a bullfighting arena.
Yes, Vicente Sánchez Navarro, born in Torrellano in 1926, is, has been and will be present in the pages of all bullfighting national and international publications. Vicente Mojica, the poet, noted that this artist "is one of the great masters of contemporary bullfighting painting."
Is he a taurine painter? Or does he simply depict the Spanish festival, or even the Portuguese one?
He has taken part in several exhibitions, such as in the Artis Gallery in Valencia, in Toisón, Madrid, at the National Editor of Madrid, and the Madrid Futbol Fan Association of Elche.
He has also performed some exhibitions in Alcoy -the city in which he lived for some years-,designing also cartoons, drawings, headers, oils and watercolors in "Ganadería" and "El Ruedo". His canvases, as Rafael Campos said in 1975, 'have the fire of life and not the coldness of technology. Sánchez Navarro has achieved with color what Von Karajan did with sound. "
The secret of Sánchez Navarro is to paint the dance between the bull and the bullfighter, the charge of the most beautiful animal in the world, the meeting between glory and death.
Vicente Sánchez Navarro has been a comprehensive painter in this field, in this genre that so masterfully understood Goya, Solana, Picasso, Zuloaga, and Benlliure y Ruano Llopis. His is a clean vision, resonant, capable of unleashing emotions with sunlight in the arena.
But above all and above any other aesthetic or artistic contingency, we have to take into account his bonhomie, his humanity, his silences of triumph, his creative power on sketch papers or before the whiteness of the canvas.
A personal and unique style, his was a single spot, a brief note or work studied and meditated, finished and signed. The world of bullfighting has lost a great man and a great teacher. With the verses of Rafael Morales we could say: The quiet and high / horn frees your restful winter / burning fullness of your wound from the bull's horn ...
Adrián Espí Valdés is a historian.