'I wanted to do something benevolent, but at first sight it seems scary […] As if the dawn and its light had remained behind. We don’t finally know whether the day starts or ends.' —Robert NavaRobert Nava is an artist who divides opinions. Like many pioneering visionaries before him, the American painter’s work has been met with skepticism and delight in equal measure. Nava’s playful and intentionally naïve approach to painting combines a childlike simplicity and nostalgic sense of uninhibited playfulness, allowing him to evoke fantastic narratives in the most direct of means. The primary focus of the artist’s work are the fantastical creatures, born from Nava’s imagination and executed in spirited gestures of spray paint, acrylic, graphite, and grease pencil. These metamorphic figures combine animals such as sharks, lions, rabbits, and wolves with archetypal characters from mythology including angels, dragons, skeletons, and witches. Treading a fine line between nightmarish and fanciful maintained through Nava’s simplistic rendering, these chimeric beasts belong to a long tradition of unnerving fantasy that includes the hybrid forms that animate Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist canvases, Alfred Kubin’s strange, Symbolist prints, and Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky. 

 

Sorry We’re Closed

As a child, Nava perfected traditional draftsmanship and gained a reputation with his peers in high school as the one who ‘could actually draw from life.’ⁱ Since completing his MFA at Yale University, the artist has worked to ‘unlearn’ conventional attributes of fine art and reconnect with the uninhibited expression and creativity of a child’s mind, a factor that situates Nava’s work in the context of early 20th century Surrealism, and the later categorisation of Art Brut by Jean Dubuffet. The resulting work draws comparisons to the irreverent ‘bad’ painting first theorized in 1978 by the New Museum’s founding curator Marcia Tucker as well as Neo-Expressionists such as Georg Baselitz and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat’s use of animal motifs is a particularly important reference point here, the headed wolf of Sterno from 1985 prefiguring Nava’s loose gestural execution and emphasis on dynamic transformation. Like Basquiat’s work, Nava’s paintings give the viewer the impression of spontaneity and speed in their creation.  Although the paintings are said to sometimes come together in a matter of moments against a techno soundtrack, the artist spends days preparing through sketching and re-sketching his ideas until the time of execution.  He says in an interview with Nate Lowman ‘Sometimes you need to go slow in the face of speed to make it look like speed.’ⁱⁱ

 

The present work Sylvia (87 Sylvia) is one of six large-scale canvases exhibited in Nava’s self-titled solo exhibition at Sorry We’re Closed in Brussels in 2020. Each work in the exhibition represents an allegory pertaining to a different irreverent theme from Time to Ecology. Sylvia (87 Sylvia) is the Allegory of Extinction, number 6 of 6, its place in the series is fitting of the finality of its theme. 
And then, the encounter, the one that pushes, from which we do not recover. Predestination. Announced always in the stars. Sylvia. Sylvia, we look at her from beyond, because after 2020, we don’t know what happened. Very few witnesses stayed behind. Elon Musk finally sequestered the richest people on the planet by not asking them for their opinion and forced them into his ships heading….? We no longer knew anything about it, saw nothing. Sylvia is a “Painting Resurrected. The bottom almost destroyed and then brought back to life, in a thing that destroys things ». Sylvia’s not a woman, it’s a huge asteroid heading straight for us. VI —Allegory of ExtinctionAnother central theme of the exhibition is light and darkness, described as the result of ‘ritual initiated in the dusk. Ending at dawn.’ The conception of Sylvia (87 Sylvia) is poised precariously between the two, with two thirds of the picture plane enveloped by the inky blackness of night.  As if wiped away, like condensation on a bathroom mirror, gaps in the black pigment create four windows into the scene behind, allowing the viewer glimpses of the monstrous being behind. Heavily abstracted by the encroaching darkness, Nava’s beasts are a tangle of teeth, scales, and claws, interrupted by planes of cobalt blue and gestural strokes of violet. Building on the theme of conflict debuted in the artist’s 2019 exhibition Vs at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, the flashes of red and yellow pierce the picture space, conjuring images of lightening, lasers, and violent spurts of blood. Nava’s creations wrestle with an invisible foe just shrouded by the gloom or perhaps with the blackness itself. These references to ingenuous violence are possibly what resonates so strongly with a generation of collectors raised on video games, sci-fi and fantasy stories. Nate Freeman explains ‘The work transports them to a time when the biggest thing they had to worry about was a monster under the bed.’ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Collector’s Digest

•    Originally from East Chicago, Robert Nava was awarded his MFA from Yale School of Fine Art in 2011 and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. 

•    Having joined Pace Gallery in 2020, Nava has already presented two exhibitions in their East Hampton space, the most recent opening in the summer of 2020.

•    Nava had his auction debut with Phillips’ 20th Century and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in July 2020. 

 

ⁱ Nate Freeman, 'Painter Robert Nava Is Hated by Art-World Know-It-Alls. So Why Are Collectors Fighting for Anything From His Studio?’, Artnet News, 19 April 2021, online 
ⁱⁱ Robert Nava, quoted in Nate Freeman, 'Painter Robert Nava Is Hated by Art-World Know-It-Alls. So Why Are Collectors Fighting for Anything From His Studio?’, Artnet News, 19 April 2021, online 
ⁱⁱⁱ Nate Freeman, 'Painter Robert Nava Is Hated by Art-World Know-It-Alls. So Why Are Collectors Fighting for Anything From His Studio?’, Artnet News, 19 April 2021, online