Press Release, Galerie du Buisson, 2014
Julie Navarro pays tribute to Romain Gary—who would have turned 100 this year—through creations inspired by his writings, particularly The Treasures of the Red Sea, in which Romain Gary immerses the reader in another world, another time.
It is about men, their wanderings and their courage: "The treasures I brought back from there are immaterial, and when the pen does not capture them, they disappear forever. As a novelist, I am in love with these ephemeral diamonds, sometimes very pure, sometimes black, but always unique and overwhelming in their mysterious brilliance, and I set out in search of them in that inexhaustible mine of wealth and poverty that was once called the human soul (...)".
Julie Navarro's pictorial research lends itself to poetic transpositions. Romain Gary, born in a land of shifting borders, is an expert in duality and instability. He exalts the ambivalence of the world and seeks dialogue with identities in the making.
Following in his footsteps, and pursuing an aesthetic path that can never be predicted, Julie Navarro continues her encounter with myths, reaching the frontiers of new readings and interpretations. She experiments with painting's ability to reproduce materials, light, and vibrations, and imbues giant stones with the weight of history embodied in petrified matter. In a video, the oval object—a UFO?—vibrates in the uncertain landscape and carries with it the experience of time.
Julie Navarro explains: "By flying higher, I express an aspiration upwards, both literally and figuratively. The world I draw is transformed into celestial objects that vibrate silently, searching for a beyond and seeking a new, cosmic, and sensitive geology. I thus let thoughts and objects drift by association of ideas. Here, celestial stones roll over themselves, lift off the ground, and finally enter a zone of indistinguishability where false and true fade away, where fiction and eternity prevail over reality."
Blurring becomes a recurring motif that expresses the movement of things, souls, and people, their fragility and instability. The body, always in metamorphosis, is found in the series Chien blanc, in which Julie Navarro depicts animal scenes: the struggle of bodies merges with physical euphoria. Between excitement, gentleness, and resistance, and with the help of radical pictorial shifts, the artist opens the imagination to the frontiers of abstraction.
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The series of paintings and the photogram of the eponymous video are presented at Mach 1 in 2019, at Galerie Julio, by art critic Laurent Quénéhen :"Mach 1 is a project about the moments when everything can accelerate, about the cosmos and black holes, about the heart that panics, about the sound visible during the supersonic bang, when the speed of life exceeds that of sound. There are installations that border on black magic, incursions into the unreal, flights into uncharted territory. The Mach 1 artists draw up plans, try out persuasive tactics, imagine tactics and create new worlds between reality, science and art. This exhibition crosses the speed of sound with the speed of monstration hic et nunc, a dazzling moment that beats at the heart of each work and still rekindles the stars.(...) Julie Navarro works by association of ideas to elaborate visual sensations. She photographed an unidentified flying object flying over the French countryside. Despite the morning mist, the artist managed to capture this ephemeral flight, shooting a striking, ghostly mass. In reality, a rare physical phenomenon coupled with a train journey that she filmed and associated with this apparition. Another equally poetic vision of her work is the painting “Black Diamond”, a living black diamond like a giant eye in space, as also glimpsed by Rihanna in her song “Diamonds”: “So shine bright tonight, You and I - Eye to eye - So alive - We're beautiful like diamonds in the sky”. Laurent Quénéhen, 2019 excerpt from Mach 1 exhibition text with Julie Dalmon, Julie Navarro, Daniela Zuniga.”