ROBERT NAVA

‘Eye To Eye With Ghost (2019)’, on view from the collection of Beth DeWoody, engages with the horror stories of our childhoods—the witches and the ghosts of our nightmares. The image is both magical and dystopian, inspiring fear but also a bit of wonder and child-like playfulness—one gets the idea that these are not in fact such horrifying creatures but perhaps just children in costume. This might be perhaps the only actual rendering of the pop cultural visual trope of the ‘witch’ in black hat with broom. While most works in the exhibition seek to reclaim our visions and understanding of the archetype of the witch, there is something to be said about this imagined Disney-esque wicked witch, who nonetheless engages with the ghost, with the spirit realm, looking the realm of our ancestors directly in the eyes without fear.

Driven by his desire to “make new myths” responsive to our times, Robert Nava has created a chimerical world of metamorphic creatures, drawing inspiration from sources as disparate as prehistoric cave paintings, Egyptian art, and cartoons. Rendered through a raw, energetic mixing of spray paint, acrylics, and grease pencil, his large-scale paintings of fantastical beasts exude a playful candidness that defies the pretensions of high art and invites viewers to reconnect with the unbridled imagination of their childhoods. To develop his uncompromisingly personal style, Nava first dispensed with the rules and conventional attitudes that he had learned while obtaining his MFA at Yale University—an attitude that aligns him with the irreverent “bad” painting first theorized in 1978 by the New Museum’s founding curator Marcia Tucker. Nonetheless, Nava’s hybrid monsters, which range from the dragon-like to the angelic, are thought-out composites that the artist continuously reworks in his sketchbooks. Drawing, in fact, constitutes the bedrock of his practice, a daily discipline of invention.