Solo Show “ Bee and Bobby Mac Leaf ”, 2021
LIUSA WANG Gallery, Paris
by Philippe Godin, La Diagonale de l’Art
" For her first solo show at Galerie Liusa Wang, Julie Navarro offers a skilful blend of aesthetic concepts, embodied in works that play with the boundaries between the arts. An atmospheric aesthetic that blends poetry and thought. The artist skilfully straddles a range of media (painting, photography, sculpture...) - blurring the boundaries between painting and writing, hearing and seeing, smell and touch. A song by Janis Joplin gives the exhibition its title, like a Proustian ritornello, inviting the viewer to let themselves be swept along by a variation of poetic shifts, in a multi-sensory experience. In this sense, Julie Navarro illustrates philosopher Gilles Deleuze's statement that art " involves all perceptive functions, transcending the classical compartmentalization of the five senses " . (...) From this point of view, doesn't the painting Prairie, which forms the monumental opening to the exhibition, condense all the richness of the artist's aesthetic? It's a work that can be experienced in every sense of the word, thanks to its odoriferous qualities, and the different perceptions that seem to pass through the sieve of this giant sieve.
The artist, who has made landscape one of her favorite themes, offers with this piece a new aesthetic consistency to that experience of nature of which she confided her perception in a recent interview:
" Faced with a landscape, whether familiar or foreign, I feel full of energy, my senses are awake, I enter into dialogue, I connect with the immediate environment. My body stretches and opens up to nature. My senses are exhilarated by the little nothings and great beauties offered by the diversity of nature in its vitality, its smells, its little noises, its connected intelligence " .
Here, the painted screen becomes the filter and transformer of a sense of landscape, depth and perspective that sets the tone for the rest of the visit. This is reminiscent of the Arte povera movement, which sought to free aesthetic experience from its often mutilating visual component, by summoning up the plurality of sensitive experience.
In Julie Navarro's approach, too, there is undoubtedly a distant filiation with a certain romanticism, that of Novalis in particular, who wrote in his hymns to the night: " The stone also breathes, the stone sparkles, and then the plant opens its pores... " .
With her portraits in laughing stone, isn't the artist extending the poet's reverie?
And isn't it the same tropism that leads Julie Navarro to seek out peat bog landscapes, a material capable of providing her with the earthy color palette and historical density with which she creates peat sculptures, which she then prints on tracing paper?
As the artist puts it:
" These little artifacts, these primitive, ghost-like forms - little skulls, little cyclops, figures that dialogue with the creatures in oil, that come to tell of a form of "unburial" of the subconscious, are at the same time a rather joyful dialogue with ancestors... " This is undoubtedly why she has entrusted the making of these Tornà to children, who are so sensitive to the fertility of the earth, to renew the secret thread that links us to the past.
In Julie Navarro's work, there's a sensibility close to that feminine part attributed to the anima in Bachelardian philosophy... Aren't these Tornà (Occitan: ghost) another way of auscultating the reveries of matter in the folds of peat?
This same collaborative approach can be found in the Mirage series, created here with elderly people.
" I love sharing things with children as much as with the elderly. With Mirage, we went for a walk in the Buttes-Chaumont park in search of the illusions of an invented nature (a tribute to Aragon's Paysan de Paris). We were in turn pedestal, sculpture and pebble... " .
Each partner photographed the other in search of a principle of illusion, displacing the subject as the partner's body became the base of the work - displacement, metaphor and metonymy. In this series, we find a play of superimpositions and symbols dear to the artist, without the work being too explicit - the elements of denotation: hay, landscape, wool - spinning the landscape being implicit...
Les Inaperçus were also born of observation of the peat bogs in the Limousin region, where the impalpable matter of the thousand-year-old soil has metamorphosed into an immemorial, floating substance, like a light mist. The weightless, pastel-colored forms radiate gentle sensations in a minimal, abstract aesthetic. As Yves Michaud writes, L'inaperçu "is the almost untraceable place of this poetic force. Julie Navarro invites us to enter and stay (...). Les Roses poudre are so discreet and so radiant with sensuality " .
The Piece of my heart series consists of small fragments of Virginia creeper from the artist's balcony, which fell during the initial confinement and caught the plaster in their fall - resulting in white stars. The artist has created a very simple, natural form of writing - the branches in the shape of letters - by applying phosphorescent paint to each of the little legs. At night, this gives the impression of a starry constellation. This edition of eight day and night duets seems to echo the work's dual register: nocturnal / diurnal; anima / animus.