Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, we need to talk about Robert Nava, this painter who makes you grimace with his deliberately badly executed creatures, you who prefer without doubt the smooth canvases where technical skill takes the place of message. Stop turning your little nose up at his monsters that seem to come straight out of a school notebook. Look instead at what is really happening on these massive canvases.
Nava, born in 1985 in East Chicago, graduated from Yale with an MFA in 2011, doesn’t care about your approval, and that’s precisely what makes his work so electrifying. His angels, dragons, sharks, and hybrid creatures in garish colors populate chaotic universes that awaken our buried capacity to create myths. Unlike some rising stars who desperately seek the critics’ assent, Nava invites our reprobation, even delights in it, like a rebellious teenager who has discovered that scandal is the supreme form of freedom.
At first glance, his paintings seem to transgress all the elementary rules of good taste. But isn’t the dissonance they provoke in us similar to that felt by the first listeners of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913)? As the musicologist Richard Taruskin explains, Stravinsky’s work “was not simply dissonant, but constituted a deliberate assault against established conventions” [1]. Nava operates this same rupture in the field of contemporary painting, rejecting with an almost violent gesture the aesthetic that is technically irreproachable and dominates so many current galleries.
His frenetic brushstrokes and greasy crayon lines immediately evoke childish art, but are revealed to be the result of a sophisticated process of unlearning. After mastering academic techniques at Yale, Nava has consciously worked to shed them, like a virtuoso who chooses to play wrong to reach a deeper truth. This approach is not unlike that of Jean Dubuffet, who sought authenticity in outsider art. The fundamental difference lies in the fact that Nava is fully aware of the art history he chooses to transgress.
The techno music that Nava listens to while painting infuses his works with an almost palpable rhythmic pulsation. When I observe his paintings like Volcanic Angel (2020), I can’t help but hear the deep, insistent beat of a kick drum, accompanied by shrill synthesizers that pierce the atmosphere. These incandescent angels emerging from vibrant monochromatic backgrounds seem to move to the rhythm of a cosmic rave. The realm of poetry he opens up is not that of the 19th-century symbolists, but that of a contemporary underground spirituality where DJs are the new shamans.
The symbolism of fire recurs constantly in his works, notably in his series of volcanic angels. This motif strangely echoes the reflections of the poet Arthur Rimbaud on illumination and seership through the “derangement of all the senses”. In his letter of May 15, 1871, to Paul Demeny, Rimbaud asserted that “the Poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses” [2]. This vision of the poet as a seer finds a striking echo in Nava’s approach, which, through a simultaneous process of construction and deconstruction, manages to create images that transport us to a mythological elsewhere.
In Night and Day Separator (2021), Nava presents us with a hybrid creature whose cosmic function is inscribed in the title itself. This entity with multiple eyes, floating in an undefined space, seems to embody the passage of primordial time. The raw quality of the line recalls hieroglyphs or cave paintings, but distinguishes itself by the use of a contemporary visual vocabulary, imbued with references to video games and cartoons. This temporal fusion creates a new syncretic mythology that transcends eras.
Unlike the sanitized abstractions that adorn so many contemporary art fairs, Nava’s paintings do not hide their process of creation. Each mark, each scribble, each splatter is left visible, creating a layered surface where the viewer can reconstruct the artist’s frenetic choreography. As Rimbaud wrote, “I witnessed the hatching of my thought: I watched it, I listened to it”. Nava invites us to this same type of active observation, to follow the traces of his visual thought in formation.
His almost ritualistic daily drawing practice constantly feeds his imagination. These preparatory sketches, made in notebooks, constitute the raw material of his monumental canvases. However, at the moment of painting, Nava frees himself from the constraints of faithful reproduction to make way for the unforeseeable. He even claims that some of his paintings were executed in just a few seconds, a record of 27 seconds for one of them. This speed of execution recalls the automatic writing of the surrealists, but without their theoretical pretension.
Nava’s visual universe draws from an eclectic reservoir of influences: prehistoric cave paintings, Egyptian art, cartoons, video games like Castlevania. His hybrid creatures, half-angels, half-aliens, embody this fusion between ancestral culture and contemporary pop imagery. In Half Angel, Half Alien 3 (2022), the celestial figure with golden wings dissolves into an abstract mass of pink and white, while a spherical eye stares at us, inviting us to recognize the fundamental strangeness of this apparition.
What truly sets Nava apart from his contemporaries is his categorical refusal of the prevailing cynicism. In an artistic world dominated by postmodern irony and endless references, his paintings display a disarming sincerity. He does not paint monsters to deconstruct the concept of monstrosity or to make a meta-critique of contemporary painting, he paints them because they inhabit him viscerally, because they are the messengers of a personal mythology in constant evolution.
In Splash Cloud (2020), a shark floats above stylized waves, spitting what could be blood or fire. This image, in its apparent simplicity, manages to capture the very essence of contemporary mysticism, a mysticism that no longer seeks its symbols in established religious traditions, but in the depths of our collective unconscious populated by media images. As Rimbaud explained, “I is another”. In Nava, this otherness takes form in these creatures that seem to surge from an elsewhere both intimate and universal.
Rimbaud’s musicality finds a striking parallel in the visual rhythm of Nava’s compositions. Just as the French poet sought the “color of vowels” and assigned a color to each vowel in his famous sonnet “Vowels”, Nava creates chromatic symphonies where each hue resonates with the others. His monochromatic backgrounds, electric blues, blood reds, acid yellows, are not mere backdrops, but energetic fields that dialogue with the figures inhabiting them.
Like Rimbaud’s poetry, Nava’s painting seeks to create bridges between the visible and the invisible, between the tangible and the mythical. When Rimbaud writes “I stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance”, he evokes this same capacity to transcend the limits of the real that we find in Nava’s airy compositions, where improbable creatures float in undefined spaces.
The Stravinsky-like notion of “savage sophistication” applies perfectly to Nava’s work. Far from being a simple regression to a pre-logical state, his paintings bear witness to a deep knowledge of art history that he chooses to transgress. Like the Russian composer who integrated folkloric elements into complex musical structures, Nava incorporates primitive visual references into a sophisticated pictorial language. The shock provoked by his works recalls that felt at the premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913, a deliberate rupture with the dominant aesthetic conventions.
In Devouring Sadness (2017), Nava presents us with a creature whose gaping mouth seems to swallow an abstract substance that could represent the sadness mentioned in the title. This image, in its apparent brutality, addresses the universal question of the transmutation of negative emotions. Like Stravinsky who explored sacrificial rites in his music, Nava explores the inner rituals by which we attempt to exorcise our personal demons.
There is in Nava’s canvases a truly carnivalesque quality, in the Bakhtinian sense of the term, a temporary reversal of established hierarchies, a celebration of irreverence and the grotesque. His monsters with deformed proportions, improbable colors, celebrate the chaotic vitality of existence, far from the policed representations favored by mainstream contemporary art.
The art market, always hungry for novelty, has quickly seized upon these unclassifiable creatures. His paintings, which sold for a few thousand dollars a few years ago, now fetch six-figure sums at auctions. This meteoric rise has sparked the usual suspicions in the art world, is this a passing fad or a lasting contribution to contemporary art? This question seems to me ultimately less interesting than what this success reveals about our era.
If Nava’s works resonate so strongly today, it is perhaps because they respond to a deep need for the re-enchantment of the world. In a society saturated with technically perfect but emotionally empty images, his imperfect monsters remind us of the original power of the creative act, not to reproduce the world, but to invent another. In this sense, Nava joins Rimbaud’s vision of the poet as a “thief of fire”, one who seizes primordial forces to forge new mythologies.
Whether one loves or hates Robert Nava’s work, it is undeniable that it leaves no one indifferent. And in an artistic landscape often dominated by conceptual tedium, this ability to provoke visceral reactions is already a form of victory. So the next time you come across one of his dismembered angels or a shark with a disproportionate jaw, don’t look away too quickly. Let yourself be surprised by this new mythology which, like The Rite of Spring in its time, could well redefine our relationship with contemporary art.
Far from being a simple return to childhood, Nava’s paintings invite us to rediscover that capacity for wonder that we have lost in growing up. As Rimbaud wrote in 1870 in his poem “Sensation”:
“On blue summer evenings, I will go down paths,
Picked at by wheat, to trample the short grass:
Dreaming, I will feel its coolness on my feet.
I will let the wind bathe my bare head.”,
This freshness of vision, this ability to abandon oneself to primary sensations, this is what the wild and poetic work of Robert Nava offers us.
- Taruskin, Richard. Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra. University of California Press, 1996.
- Rimbaud, Arthur. Lettre du voyant to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871, in Oeuvres complètes. Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1972.
