Solo Show “ Cosmopool ”, 2023
LIUSA WANG Gallery, Paris
written by Mariane de Douhet, 2023
We hesitate in front of Julie Navarro's kinetic paintings. Are we at the edge of water and its ripples, close to its trembling waves, in the fluidity of a flowing nature? Facing the splendid debris of an unknown planet?
Or, far from these visions of liquid depths and the tranquility they emanate, are we witnessing the nervous derailments of glitched screens, the madness of their crushed pixels?
In her Vibrations d’eau, we search for what we see: first, a watery sensation, composed of an infinity of drops and ripples, made sensitive, despite Leibniz's displeasure, by the artist. These animated canvases, whose iridescence interacts with light, are indeed portions of the cosmos. Doubt creeps in, ambiguity arises; upon closer inspection, the shimmering becomes geometric, water reflections stretch and grid, material concretions resemble fragmented pixel clusters; among the hues, some seem to have been mixed with delicately psychedelic acids.
We shift from one hypnosis to another, into an abstraction that is no longer organic but digital, somewhere between post-digital Nymphéas and an iridescent Tetris.
In the artist's work remains the enigma of perception, through which her Vibrations d’eau intersect with other vibrations - computer vibrations - or what shimmers also reveals what decomposes; the nature of the shimmering changes, uniting the first while undoing the others.
The grid - that is, the mosquito net - is the material element at the heart of Julie Navarro's work. The artist superimposes layers of them, aligns or shifts the holes, paints their surface, from which she unveils new depths, precipitating their metamorphosis. Because they constitute a framework, a mesh of intersecting lines, forming cells, mosquito nets have a matrix dimension for the visual artist: fabrics of cells, they carry within them a potential fertility, one that also conveys, through their humid and living density, the peat bogs - a landscape that Julie Navarro has intensely explored in her work, between Paris and Creuse, which her artworks absorb. The technical gesture, with humor and humility, clothespin, homemade frame, and Creuse grass as support, metabolizes into poetic operation.
We look again at these mosquito nets, their multiple reincarnations, from their childhood as tools of humans to their transformed existence as fragments of nature and/or digital embroidery.
The Vibrations d’eau artworks are worked into the body; the artist delves into the material to ultimately bestow it with the grace of a floating object.
On the contrary, the Echo series (Luminous Vibrations), snapshots of the almost invisible, seems to have originated from a gesture that occurred on its own, without an artist or brushes, through the simple intervention of light and its desire to spread across the surface of a diaphanous canvas.
Julie Navarro's art is spectral in a double sense, dispersing pigments, capturing, with the grace of a bird, the mobile radiation, open to disappearance; because it is on the lookout for ghostly presences, shadows, and imprints.
Her artworks urge us to enhance the power of the eye - rather than reinforcing the visible. The motif of the wave is everywhere: in water, in light, in the music and dance of the balls organized by the artist. The wave, the propagation of a disturbance producing a reversible variation of the local physical properties of the medium along its path; there is no doubt that the artist imparts a vitality
that spreads, when she brings together, on the occasion of performances in peat bogs or in her Parisian balls, individuals who are unknown to each other, unfamiliar with the art world, and invites them to 'produce a common body.