“ Je vois le ciel au fond du puits ” - 2016
Salaisons hors les murs (Espace sans frontière), Paris
by Laurent Quénéhen, art critic
There is the visible world, and there is something else that lies underneath, beyond cultures and countries, as though engraved in hollow, in the white interspaces between the signs. Even if you do not understand foreign languages, or what is being said, you still perceive what is at stake, since a helping hand is a helping hand. French writer Nathalie Sarraute used the term “ tropisms ” , derived from the Greek tropos, meaning the tendency of an organism, a plant, to grow in a given direction, whether downwards or towards the light. Tropisms may sometimes be understood as extensions of the visible into the non-visible. Similarly, saxifrages may arise from the most barren rocks, or grow on our cities’ tarmac and concrete slabs– and our very lives may well echo the green world around us.
Julie Navarro treads on a fertile soil, from which emanates the dense fragrance of the earth lying underfoot, as humus is a layered composite, a palimpsest of the history of the ancestors, of those who are both below and above, already gone but always present.
Her research is oriented towards the depths: in Drosera, the artist listens to the sounds of the peatlands, that lush landscape of peaks and valleys where one can read, through the short depth of only two meters, the whole evolution of the past ten thousand years. On contact with the air, moisture from the ground casts over the bogs will-o'the-wisps, like ghosts that surface to greet us.
The artist is well acquainted with Pachamama, our Mother Earth, the earth goddess, closely linked to fertility, and regarded by the Inca people as a living being. In North Western Argentina, the contemporary ritual to Pachamama is to dig a hole in the mouth of the earth, the Boca, which provides access to the heart of the deity. People feed the Boca with grains and alcohol, and then close it again while dancing and singing, in hopes of a prosperous year to come.
By closely listening to the ground, the artist thus reveals what connects us: as in animist Africa and Mongolia, where men believe that even things have a soul, the earth is revealed as a fluid flowing through all beings, animals, foliage. In her plastic work, unseen networks are woven, threads are stretched between life and non-life, and what is not seen is shown in full colour, while we find ourselves immersed in the green of leaves, the rose of Eros or the blue of the sky. There is, as Gilles Deleuze puts it, a real logic of sensation.
In her workshop, the shapes are rounded, they repeat themselves, while materials, wool or cotton, remind us of natural patterns. The lines of her paintings are paths to follow, and these open lines, combined with sensuous oval shapes, yield myriad impressions and a latent eroticism, as though they were extensions of the hollows and undulations of the body, the waves of the ocean, or the mother-earth in the bogs of the Limousin: the cosmos here, all desire, unified in one formal instant. From behind their frame of glass, her works are watching us; these are eyes and flowers from Spain, breasts as round as mathematical abstractions.
And her scraps of sentences in black on white, like automated email replies, become the fatal allegory of the phantom of French governance and administration. These words remind us of the architecture of a crematorium: the dead speak to us.
Her explorations into the interior of earth might be precisely what drove Julie Navarro to engage in political practice, and to create art in the context of everyday life. As she made her way to the surface, she brought the community together - residents, artists and politiciansalike. Through the aesthetics of the ephemeral, she emphasizes this essential, but oft-forgottenpoint: what unites men is greater than what divides them.
In the same way as one creates a path by walking, what is important here is the process, whatshines through, and what unites us. The same can be said of her embroideries, and of her “Battles” gathering dancers and embroiderers, often senior ones.
Julie Navarro is focused on doing, on experimenting, recusing ready-made thinking, rejecting the cult of youth and the fashions of the day, which she does not follow. She brings up to date an ancestral practice, an ancient craft: this is about art in the heart of the city, about the artist as citizen, doing his/her job just like a butcher or a florist, and not as a god to be worshippedby the happy few in some quaint museums. The time for idolatry is over.
These feelings have become rooted again in the heart of the most cosmopolitan district of Paris, the 19th arrondissement. This exhibition begs to be experienced like a walk in the countryside: signs are here to guide us; traces bring us together, in a soothing way, and give us faith in humanity - from end to beginning, the eternal repetition, the irony and beauty of Art in all its natural complexity.