Even in the busiest cities it is possible to find a place for calm and rest.

Eva Nararro’s latest paintings celebrate summer, with figures bathed in sunlight relaxing in invisible parks or calmly strolling down unseen avenues. They represent characters she has found enjoying their time throughout Europe, “sunbathers on the banks of the Rhine in Basel, young ladies meeting for an appetizer before lunchtime in Córdoba, a young boy wearing his Sunday clothes playing with a ball, cyclists heading to the beaches of Malaga.” Removed from their original urban environments and placed against her signature abstract backgrounds, they seem to inhabit a mental landscape—the artist’s, the viewer’s, or their own.

In her recent work, Navarro has increasingly embraced a spontaneous, organic process when it comes to creating her painterly backgrounds. As she puts it, they have become “co-protagonists” in the paintings—active regions of color and form that recall the work of impressionists and abstract expressionists, and seem to reflect the moods of her mysterious, anonymous figures. The subjects themselves derive from her extensive travels, on which she takes thousands of photographs of passers-by to integrate into her world. With their faces averted, they become vehicles for our reflection, even as they seem immersed in their own thoughts. As Navarro says, “My anonymous characters are only a means to express what really matters to me, which is the intangible, the emotions, the time that vanishes, our existential doubts and worries of everyday life.”

A Spanish painter who lives and works in Madrid, Navarro studied fine art at Madrid’s Universidad Complutense and Artaquio Art Academy. In the course of her twenty-year career, she has exhibited across Spain as well as in Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Portugal, Canada, and the U.S. Most recently she was a resident artist at the Tao Hua Tan Residency in China, and in 2016 took first place in Denmark’s VKR75 International Painting Competition.