The first thing I see in Robert Nava’s Brooklyn studio is four sets of bloody fangs. They appear in three different paintings of three different creatures: a shark, a dragon, and a roaring two-headed tiger. Crudely rendered in acrylic and oil, these beasts can appear flat on a screen, but in person, they feel as if they could come to life at any moment.
The impulsive energy of his paintings is the product of Nava’s process. While he may deliberate on an idea for months and draw it over and over again in notebooks, he sometimes paints it in seconds. “It’ll be muscle memory,” he explains.
Nava has been working to rein in his prolific tendencies, however, while awaiting his upcoming solo show at Pace in New York, which opens March 14. Surging demand for his work in recent years has pushed the artist’s auction prices as high as $715,000. But it’s often at precisely this stage of success that artists need to protect their careers the most. Nava has learned about the dangers of overexposure and is trying to practice patience. “But I’ll be honest,” he admits, “I feel like a Ferrari that only is allowed to go 40 miles an hour,” he says.
Nava’s critics, and there are plenty, tend to see his paintings as a kind of adolescent effrontery, perhaps an intellectual insult and, taking into account his prices, an exorbitant gimmick. But while there’s an undeniably juvenile quality to Nava’s work, he speaks more in the guileless language of a child than that of a cynical teen.
The satisfyingly swift execution of a painting, for example, is like “a flawless victory in Mortal Kombat.” Crits at Yale, where he earned his MFA, were like “gladiator matches.” And ultimately, he learned to fight with a “sword” in the art world, he says, like the young Spartan in the action movie 300.
While Nava bides his time until he can exhibit his next body of work, he has co-curated a show at Pace Los Angeles titled “The Monster,” opening Feb. 1, featuring artists he admires, including Huma Bhabha, Thomas Houseago, and Paul McCarthy. And he’s been playing a lot of Magic: The Gathering, where, he says, “an invitation to the imagination opens up.”
