The Unnoticed
by Yves Michaud
June 19, 2016Julie Navarro bursts with energy for herself and for others.
For others: through all her social, cultural and artistic activities, as she strives each time to leverage the natural creative abilities of everyone, starting with those who would not even think of entering the sphere of the arts - the elderly, immigrant women, and not just the privileged few. For herself, through her residencies, photos, performances, “public sculptures”, videos - and of course paintings, drawings, embroidery and all that is now called “mixed media”.
Much in Julie Navarro’s body of work revolves around a subtle theme – that of the unnoticed -
which comes in many forms and on many occasions, implicitly or explicitly.
Implicitly or explicitly: already I see how paradoxical it is to say that there is such a thing as the explicit unnoticed. And yet!
Implicitly or half veiled, the unnoticed first appears in Julie Navarro’s paintings and drawings themselves when they evoke a form or develop themselves from a form, be it an animal, a piece of furniture, a house, a garden, or a cloud, later to turn into abstraction and expression.
The unnoticed is already becoming more visible in her embroideries that briskly follow a drawn line,
evoking a face, a gesture, a body part, a line of hair, striking an unstable and ambiguous balance
between the pre-marked medium and what is inscribed in by the artist.
This unnoticed is even more surprisingly present in what Julie Navarro calls her “social sculptures”.
Once you have understood what is really happening here, it becomes impossible not to see it.
For what I have called "social, cultural and artistic" activities, in which Julie Navarro invites groups
of people apparently far removed from the arts of dancing and singing to take part in performances,
are in fact in her eyes "social sculptures" that produce artistic moments involving everyone and turning the audiences into participants.
We know Erwin Wurm’s living sculptures in which the artist is photographed in some more or less incongruous everyday poses (such as putting on and taking off a garment). Here we are dealing with human groups similar to the ones Wurm engages with, and these ephemeral sculptures are "unnoticed" and yet highly experienced and felt.
Lastly, there is in Julie Navarro’s works the unnoticed that is openly, consciously and explicitly perceived and crafted as such. This is what she has actually called in recent years her "Inaperçus" : light, fragile works, all in transparency, which retain almost anything as fragile emotions, light desires or at least convey the impression.
I especially like the series of Powder Roses, so quiet and yet filled with so radiant a sensuality.
In the welter of so-called contemporary art, everything is possible and Julie Navarro’s works do not escape this profusion - she even enjoys it. What now makes the difference between strong works and those that are less or not at all significant, is their poetic charge, this subtle "je ne sais quoi" which takes us beyond curiosity.
The unnoticed is the almost impossible place where this poetic force resides. That’s where Julie Navarro invites us to come in and linger.
Yves Michaud, June 19, 2016
Yves Michaud is an art critic, a philosopher and the former Director of the School of Fine Arts in Paris