It is difficult to categorize the work of John Nava, for if he works outside current trends, he also eludes the label of realist. In contrast to the the neutrality of strict realism, Nava infuses a classical hierarchy of values in his images and often composes highly scrutinized subjects in stark and abstract contexts.
Painting the figure is at the heart of Nava's work, and not just to paint it over and over again as subject, but to paint it with the ultimate intention - the hope - that he will eventually get it right. I want to make the figure appear in a stunning way. I want to make it beautiful. Such statements remind one of Ingres' pursuit of perfection, and for Nava this illusive goal constitutes the deepest preoccupation in painting. Painting the nude figure, however, involves the viewer with more than an appreciation of its complex technical process, for one is forced to confront the pressing problem of its erotic connotations. Art has always dealt directly with this issue by aestheticizing the subject, indeed the whole of culture/art is often interpreted as a strategy to put our illicit obsessions into socially acceptable form. These strategies are a central focus of Nava's work.
In Studio Interior the model is about to return to the model stand and resume her pose. She is tying nasturtiums in her hair. Nava's intent was to put the viewer in the place of the artist - to survey nature through the eyes of the cultural processor - the painter. The model is an analogy to nature and like nature, she is at once plainly before our eyes, yet remains mysterious and somehow hidden from us. Behind the model and centered in the upper third of the painting, he has drawn what he calls a Doryphorus-type figure on a grid. Like Polyclitus' famous work it represents a rationalized abstraction and is intended to contrast with the naturalism of the model standing in the foreground. For Nava, the studio has become culture's laboratory, full of instruments and apparatus to capture nature and form it. The model is nude - natural - and needs nothing to be or exist.
Studio Interior clearly alludes to Vermeer in subject and structure. Its composition is founded on the same structural principles of De Stijl, for the surface of the painting has been divided into geometric areas that recall a Vantongeloo or a Mondrian, although here complicated by the illusion of depth and a need to faithfully render real objects. And, as in all of Nava's paintings, the surface is covered with seemingly effortless touches that deserve acknowledgment.
In the very large composition of Artist and Model, the dark interior of the room becomes a foil for the lighted figures. The picture plane has been broken up somewhat similar to Studio Interior, but less severely so. The artist - a portrait of his friend the painter Dan McCleary - confronts a canvas on an easel which divides the painting into two halves and doubles as a physical and psychological barrier to the pensive model. The inwardness of her pose again refers to nature's obliviousness and inaccessablity even under direct observation.
I think of the tradition of studio themed pictures - I'm thinking of Vermeer and Velasquez or the Vollard Suite - as metaphors about the struggle to order the world and the consequent invention of the beautiful. Nava reiterates this struggle in Artist and Model with a small trompe l'oeil rendering of a snapshot placed in the center of the painting that depicts figures wrestling in a blasted landscape. On another level, the meaning of the relationship of the two figures is enigmatic and open to subjective interpretations, and it is the provocative fact that Nava deliberately staged this drama after Degas' Interior (notoriously mis-titled Le Viol ). The layers of meanings in a work, however, do not guarantee a picture's importance to Nava. For him the work finally succeeds or fails in direct relationship to the success or failure of the painted figures.
His Portrait of R. is an unclothed figure rather than a nude, and because it is devoid of the rationalization of nature we commonly call idealization, its powerful confrontational stance seems perverse and shocking. It is probably with this work that Nava moves closest to those 20th century artists he most admires including painters as diverse as Balthus and Casorati, Lucian Freud and Euan Uglow. They are part of what he calls an eccentric tradition of modern figurative visionaries who, parallel to the mainstream of Cezanne, Duchamp and Pollock have produced unique and powerful work outside conventional currents
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M. Sleeping is a long horizontal painting of a figure on a white surface silhouetted against a dark background and is one from a series that Nava calls sleeping figures. He finds the common activity of watching a sleeping person, especially children or lovers, fascinating, and he believes that even though the sleepers are unaware of our gaze, they cast a mysterious power over us. M. Sleeping, one of Nava's most beautiful and haunting paintings, combines sensuality and vulnerability within a simple format that serves as a perfect foil for his technical virtuosity.
All portrait painters must deal with two often contrasting demands: to please the sitter while maintaining one's creative integrity. It is daunting enough to do one or the other, but it is extremely difficult to combine both. In the Portrait of Kelley M. (with Mavis) Nava has depicted a beautiful young woman seated on an antique red chair. A French bulldog stares out to the viewer.
Nothing is generalized - the portrait is a perfect likeness - but it is fascinating because it transcends the likeness. An ingenious tension is established here: The dog looks at the viewer, the viewer looks at the sitter, and she looks away.
There is something admirable, even intimidating, in John Nava's technical virtuosity, but the mastery of craft, necessary as it is, is only part of the creative process. Of equal significance, although less obvious, is the problem solving, the conceptualization that the craft ultimately makes visible. This exhibition is a testament to Nava's ability to intelligently combine the two.
