Animal metamorphoses, contrast of colors, thick brushstrokes, dark themes, dystopian worlds, a certain cynical look, glimpses of hell. These will probably be some impressions from anyone who visits in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid the exhibition of the American painter Robert Nava. This is the artist’s first monographic exhibition.
in a Spanish museum, with a total of 17 large format pieces painted between 2019 and 2024.
Born in 1985 in Chicago, Robert Nava is linked to the artistic movement known as Bad Painting or “bad paint.” This movement was first theorized in 1978 by the critic and curator Marcia Tickerwho used that expression to refer to the style of the artists in an exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and is part of the figurative painting of the decade. The movement seeks to disfigure or deform reality, far from any canon or stereotype, with the intention to institutionalize the so-called “bad taste.”
From May 11 to September 22
The exhibition, which opened on May 11 and will be open until September 22, brings together works made with sprays, acrylic, grease pencil and oil on canvas, inspired by cave paintings, Egyptian art and cartoons. Starring fantastic animals that go from dragons to demon angelsNava’s work breaks away from the rules and conventions learned during his Fine Arts studies at Yale University to mix disparate styles and themes.
‘Volcanic angel’
In the first room dedicated to the painter, all eyes are focused on the same painting, titled volcanic angel. It is a fusion of angel and demon. The halo, the blonde of the hair and the wings contrast with the red of some details, the black gaze, a cadaverous face and a knife with an intense flame of fire at the tip. Colors play a fundamental role. The mixture of pictorial techniques allows the author to highlight some features such as the angel’s hair, created with thick brushstrokes and even blobs of paint that have not been worked on, along with the intense yellow, orange and red of the fire.
Although the main theme of the exhibition revolves around the animal transfiguration and the evocation of a world flooded with magic, the paintings and the technique used They are very different. For example, in the unfinished drawing of Dog with greasy fang Four figures appear: an animal with a horn and wings, a shark, a pink figure with wings and a horn that resembles a mixture of a unicorn and a bird, and a four-eyed beast covered in doodles.
Dystopian vision of the world
Nava’s work is full of cynicism and shows a dystopian vision of the world. However, despite how unpleasant some of the figures represented may be, the impression that his paintings It is not pessimistic or negative. The warm, strong, contrasting tones, the absence of perspective and the unordered scribbles that border on the absurd, far from frightening, They are attractive.
Nava does not intend to give any lesson, don’t even make you think. He simply wants to create new myths and get away from the rules that limit his creativity. “His large-scale paintings of fantastic beasts exude a playful frankness that challenges the pretensions of great art and invites viewers to reconnect with the unbridled imagination of his childhood,” reads the description of the work published on the Pace Gallery website. And so it is: his work leaves no one indifferent.
