Robert Nava: Mirror Quest

These new paintings are both mirrors and portals. Traversing the knife-edge between gestural abstraction and figurative imagery, the artist's compositions transport the viewer into spaces of fantasy, populated by a cast of specters that take the form of creatures, landscapes, and objects at once mythic and every day.

This new body of work is unified by the pictorial device of a gilded frame. Inside these painted frames, the artist samples subject matter from across his various bodies of work, while further developing his signature iconography into a meditation on painting as an alchemical process for producing enchantment. Nava's paintings ask us: When is an image a reflection of our world and when is it a gateway into another? How do paintings haunt our memory and infect our dreams?

Referring to the opulent gilded frames that typically adorn Old Master canvases, Nava's frames are by contrast deliberately gaudy and unstable. Suggesting the art-historical link between vision, vanity, and vanitas, the artist's frames transform pictorial space into stage-sets for fantasy, death, and splendor. Built from loose and rapid applications of metallic paint, his frames evoke rather than describe the intricately carved and gilded surfaces that proliferate in neoclassical galleries. Yet they perform a similarly complex function.

Nava's subject matter deftly interweaves the terrifying and the adorable, the angelic and the demonic. Serpentine and snake-like creatures recur, often bearing fangs and confronting the viewer. Fantastical chimaeras proliferate, as in the figure of a hybrid bear-alligator who rises to menace the viewer in Changing Your Mind Last Minute (Split Decision) (2023), or the heads of bear-foxes affixed to the bodies of jetliners in Portal Planes (2023). Yet not all of Nava's creatures menace. The placid expression a porpoise-like entity surfacing under a starry moonlit sky in Raindrop Star Maker (2023) suggests a moment of oceanic repose, rhyming with the serene sensibility of cool clouds of fog parting to reveal snow-capped peaks in Hidden Fog Temple (2023).

The resulting works operate somewhere between Alice's looking glass and the Evil Queen's magic mirror, between the channel-surfing aesthetics of television and the transient spectacles of social media. These paintings are haunted objects that pierce our reality and reconfigure it strangely. Likening the metamorphic visions of a fairy-tale reflecting pool to the "augmented reality" of technological vision, these paintings reconfigure the contours of a primal imagination, rendering the solidity of the canvas into a liquid space for enchantment and, ultimately, freedom.