AMULETO

Ana Navas has worked with a wide range of materials—fabric, metal, wood, plastic, and paper—and since 2014 has incorporated glass into her practice. Amuleto, presented at Crisis Gallery in Lima, marks a new phase in her exploration of this fragile medium, following earlier experiments at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. In Amuleto, Navas works with glass as both surface and substance, fusing glass onto glass through a technically demanding kiln process. As the artist notes, the final result is only revealed once the piece cools, allowing fire to complete the work. This controlled surrender to heat gives each piece a distinct identity, combining the artist’s hand with the unpredictable sensuality of melted glass. The works retain Navas’s precise compositional intentions—visible in color, contour, and fragment arrangement—while evoking abstraction’s spiritual lineage. Pieces such as Destello function as “glass organisms,” shaped by the artist’s long-standing fascination with figures like Hilma af Klint, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as with symbolism, ethnography, and theosophy. Trained in abstraction and attentive to the circulation of visual language beyond its original contexts, Navas consistently merges modernist references with traces of everyday culture. In Amuleto, these references are present but softened by fire, allowing abstraction’s spiritual charge to come forward. Ultimately, the works invite open interpretation. Each viewer encounters them alone, free to construct meaning. In this sense, Amuleto lives up to its name: the works act as objects of protection and generosity, offering space for reflection and imagination in a visual culture increasingly driven by fixed messages.