Robert Nava’s rudimentary portraits of monsters, angels, and animals function as iconography in the artist’s practice of disrupting classical depictions of mythical archetypes. While pursuing his MFA at Yale University, Nava studied the hyperrealism of Old Masters before pivoting to abstract figuration by mimicking adolescent mark-making.i The Tunnel, painted in 2019, highlights this illusion of immaturity and illustrates a monster whose symmetrical composition of blood-red eyes, pointed teeth, and sharp claws is bifurcated by negative space. This emphasis on bold gesture combined with myth storytelling has brought Nava much critical acclaim and earned him a style likened to 20th century pillars of art history such as Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The present work, which was previously offered by Phillips as the artist’s auction debut in 2020, is associated with a turning point in the artist’s career, predating a sold-out show with Pace Gallery and the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York with Vito Schnabel.
“I’m a huge fan of Basquiat and Cy Twombly because of the raw gesture. Before them, you could call it scribbles, but they proved there is an art to this. I love that static ball of energy toward aesthetics. When you dive into the subjects of Basquiat, you’re opening an encyclopedia of his references.”
—Robert NavaMyth and Mark-Making
Engaging themes of myth and fantasy, The Tunnel is an exemplar of the artist’s spellbinding obsession with recontextualizing traditional tropes. The work was created during a period in which “angels and monsters started to have their own little battles in [his] studio” for the role of leading protagonist on the canvas.ii The artist’s hand is evident in streaks of acrylic pigment and jagged line work. This emphasis on gesture when recontextualizing archetypes from Western narratives is reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus from 1962. Here, Twombly references classical Roman mythology in a striking abstracted attitude, with scribbles of color representing the form of a Demigod reaching for a fallen war companion. The notion of abstracted figuration is inherently romantic; the expressive mark-making of both works emphasizing emotions of loss or fear.
Detail of the present work. “It started in my studio building, which was full of graffiti. I’m not sure if I fully understand how inspiration works, but subconsciously seeing all of the marks on the walls and seeing the aggressive nature of the city while working as a truck driver—as fast as it goes and the hustle is on and you’re in the hustle—does come out in the ferocity of the line and intensity of color. And living and working in a small Brooklyn studio is as serious as a heart attack and as laughable as a cartoon at the same time.”
—Robert NavaBrooklyn Based
Nava fuses a myriad of source material such as Renaissance paintings and contemporary graffiti into his gestural mixed media style as both a reaction to and expression of Brooklyn’s effervescent alternative youth culture. The artist’s Bushwick studio often vibrates with techno music as Nava tears through canvas after canvas. Spontaneity is essential to Nava’s practice, often the artist “[goes] in drawing blind.”iii The vigorous brushstrokes in The Tunnel, work in tandem with bursts of spray paint, illuminating inspirations of gesture from a child’s drawing to a street artist’s medium of choice.
i Paul Laster, “Robert Nava on Unleashing the Child Within,” Art & Object, March 4, 2021, online.
ii Robert Nava, quoted in Osman Can Yerebakan, “Paintings Can Talk Back to You: Robert Nava Interviewed by Osman Can Yerebakan,” Bomb Magazine, March 24, 2021, online.
iii Robert Nava, quoted in Sasha Bogojev, ”In Conversation with Robert Nava,” Juxtapoz, September 18, 2019, online.
Provenance
Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels
Private Collection
Private Collection, United States (acquired from the above)
Phillips, New York, July 2, 2020, lot 9
Acquired at the above sale by the present ownerArtist Biography
Robert Nava
Robert Nava (b. 1985) is a contemporary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Using a rough and
free-flowing hand, Nava recreates the innocent and unlearned art of childhood. His works are
“carefully done wrong,” subverting the rigid fundamentals of painting and conventions of
completeness that Nava learned as an MFA student at Yale University. Nava’s paintings often
feature imagined mythological figures and histories of the artist’s creation whose drama is
brought to life with the frenetic energy of the artist’s brush.
41
The Tunnel
each signed and dated “Nava 19” on the reverse
acrylic and spray paint on canvas, diptych
each 78 3/4 x 39 1/2 in. (200 x 100.3 cm)
overall 78 3/4 x 79 in. (200 x 200.7 cm)
Executed in 2019.
Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000
Avery Semjen
Head of Sale, New Now
212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com
New Now
New York Auction 8 March 2023
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