Promises Kept
by Yves Michaud
Philosopher, art critic, previously Director of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Parisby Yves Michaud
April 2013
For an art critic who strives to rationalise what he sees and defends, Julie Navarro poses a real problem.
Indeed here is a young self-taught artist, highly qualified in other disciplines and involved in numerous
cultural, community-based and political activities, who succeeds in consistently producing a body of
work that spans current creative processes – painting, sculpture, photography, collage, video… and
even embroidery – with dynamism and enjoyment which flout any attempt to be enlisted. Navarro
advances without worrying about references or filiation. Hers is an uncontrollable drive.
Having known her for some time, I was initially skeptical since I questioned the solid grounding of
her work. I found it impressive and brilliant but I wondered whether it would last in the long run.
Unfortunately I have met many young artists in the art world, including those in art schools, whose
promising beginnings get lost because they are kept at arm's length by their professors, or because
they remained in the middle ground. Shortly after, they start fraying at the seams and stop short, or
disappear in a murmur.
At first Navarro made good abstract paintings, a post-Ecole de Paris abstraction, between lyricism
and expressionism, cloud-like (known as nuagisme) and gestural, with clear signs of a gift. I wondered what would occur in the long run.
It is with great pleasure that I must admit that eight years later, it still holds true and is gaining in force.
The paintings have great vigour, the treatment of colour has obvious qualities, composition comes
naturally, with no effort or effect, but simplicity and immediacy. The gesture is assured and confident.
In small – or in fact medium – formats, Navarro sometimes reminds me of Robert Motherwell, Tal Coat or Olivier Debré, and also at times Dominique Thiolat. She has no concern to be like them or to be particularly different. I simply wish to cite interesting connections with common strengths in the poetry of evocative forms and colours.
If I was to speculate on future developments for her to test out and experience, I would suggest it could be the conquest of larger dimensions. Julie Navarro is going to have to tackle this even though at the moment she is still as an “amateur” and doesn't really have a studio as such which would enable her to work on huge (and unsalable) canvases. Nevertheless she will have to try.
The drawings have similar qualities though they are perhaps even more blatantly visible: nothing or
near to nothing is enough for her to occupy a piece of paper, to give rise to a form or a silhouette,
suggest a story, or rather something like a ghost or a fantasy. In fact Navarro's abstraction is charged
with myth – personal obsessions that I will not attempt to unravel here but which enable everyone to
find a space for projection.
The collages confirm the depth of meanings lodged in the background and have a delightful
strangeness about them, including when they take the form of “sculptures”, that is the improbable
juxtaposition of objects – a TV monitor and ceramic flowers destined for funerary decoration.
Currently what also intrigues and interests me in particular in Julie Navarro's very diverse production
are the embroideries. She does them automatically, compulsively, obsessively, motifs, figures, animals,
scenes. She embroiders on canvas, place mats, photographs, tapestry. Despite the fact that this type
of work has been claimed in recent years by leading feminist artists like Rosemarie Trockel, Navarro's
work has great simplicity in the motifs, fragility in the compositions, powerful souvenirs are rendered
with lightness, and with poetry in the titles, something takes us beyond the conventions of painting,
and beyond the conventions of contemporary art.
Today this body of work is more than promising: it displays maturity but also a capacity for inner
explorations which I find very moving – and I shouldn't be the only one.
On the horizon it sounds as though Julie Navarro might well dedicate herself with strength and
depth to her work which would therefore no longer be “squeezed” in between her other activities
but become central to her life.
This will doubtless bring about new surprises. I have every confidence in the next stages.