As you step in Robert Nava’ studio, you’re overwhelmed by the bold and vibrant energies that animate all his work, and his genuinely creative persona.

At the moment of our visit there was some loud metal music spreading across the room, where multiple works either on progress or just finished covered all the walls, with others stacked behind, and several drawings spread in the space or guarded inside the multiple notebooks.

Nava had just shipped a few weeks ago an entire body of new works for his first solo at Pace in London, but he was in full activity already.

Robert Nava started drawing and painting when he was a child, and he never stopped since then. 

Later he would show me a series of surprisingly impressionist-styled early works he made when he was a teenager. He jokes with me, saying: “People would probably never imagine, but I was actually very good at photorealistic drawings as well” .

Beyond the strong demand of his works forcing him to constantly produce, Nava had first and foremost a clear need to create and an urgency to make art, to express his powerful imagination tracing his visions on the surface of a canvas, or of a sketchbook.

Nava talks about his practice as a journey, and as a playful exploration: he wants to fully enjoy the process of creation, be free to fluidly let these electric creative energies flow out of him, through his body and gestures and free from any filter of tradition, convention or trend. 

For that reason Robert Nava’ language is extremely personal, independently outspoken and deliberately expressive. In fact, despite the fantastical subjects often included, his works are much more about the gestures bodily reported on the canvas, colors and shapes, than the characters themselves.

Purposely the artist defies to impose any specific reading of his works, leaving them open for the viewer, who is asked to decode the several symbols he disseminates on the surface.

Arcane symbolism may be present, but never explicitly declared, with one of the recurring themes being the eternal conflict between good and bad, negative and positive, angels and demons.

Some figures or even entire compositions repeat themselves in a cyclic way, from sketches to work on paper and then on canvases. 

He shows me a work from a couple of years ago, and it’s very much a kind of duplicate of one he has just finished. As he’s not able to retrieve it, he would explain, he just tried to remake it. 

He confesses to me that he has just started to keep some works for himself: especially in the event of a museum show, he wants to be able to have a body of work from different periods of his practice.

As we talk about the market hype on his work commanding higher and higher prices at auction today, he proves to be very conscious of the risks. 

In this new version of the painting, however, we can see how Nava also began to to introduce material applications.

This can be also observed in other works: I can perfectly guess how he’s actually leading into a more textured and plastic approach to painting, exploring density of thicker layers, encrusted levels and other material applications. 

Curiously some passages remind Van Gogh: as he later confesses, the artist is also a great source of inspiration for his practice, along with all the Impressionism.

Much more evident, however (despite few commenting on that yet), it’s his direct connection with all the abstract expressionism, more specifically for this physically instinctive approach to the canvas, and the importance attributed to this kind of randomantic signs and traces. 

William De Kooning in particular seems to be a great reference, sharing with him the same fiercely physical, vigorous and brakeless approach to the canvas.

However, Nava is probably most known for his creative use of spray paint: 

“It’s like drawing with the air”, he comments. 

But he would never directly associate his practice with street art: it’s more the quality of this medium, what really interests him. 

Nevertheless, his work just seems to absorb fully the bold urban energies of a city like New York, initiating an imaginative journey similar to the one encouraged by the beats of the Techno music he often listens to. Similarly, both this music and his art draw from contradictory forces, sometimes tapping into some deeper darker side.

At the time of our visit Nava was about to leave in a few days for London for his first major show with Pace gallery: it’s his first time there, and he confessed how we couldn’t wait to visit the places where Francis Bacon used to go for drinks, as well as all the museums. 

I suggest he should try to find the time to go also to Paris, being an easy and quick train ride from there. He agrees he needs to see in person the Impressionist masters. I’m very curious to see what he will bring back from this trip to Europe.

Nava, as I could detect in my visit, is already embarking in some new exciting directions for his practice. In this way, the artists seems to fearlessly pursues this restless explorative journey into the unprecedented possibilities of painting, that makes his artistic language so bold and unique within the contemporary art scene today in “making new myths” responsive to our times.