Expression of Protest

Neo-Icons by John Nava at Sullivan and Goss through November 22^nd.

I don’t do baroque or expressionism, but I can make a beautiful painting of a real kid.

--John Nava

John Nava’s show, Neo-Icons, at Sullivan Goss though November 22,^nd has been in the news and attracted threats primarily as the result of the reproduction of one painting, Signing Statement Law or An Alternate Set of Procedures.. Let us spend some time actually looking at it.

The painting is square, a disquieting proportion for portraiture, as the figure fills only the central third, the background stretching out on either side like the wings of a triptych. The figure faces us straight on, as one might expect of an icon, and its colors are saturated, but only slightly, as if your vision had been turned up a notch. The artist has taken pains, though subtly, to tell us that what happens within this space is important.

The details, in particular, are important. One detail has attracted all the attention, the words on the subject’s tee shirt, “America Tortures.” The painting itself, however, does not distinguish this detail as THE detail. Though the words are close to the center and red, they are also small and difficult to make out against bright green. At the same time, the painting offers many other details, and to ignore any of them is to do violence to the image. It describes, for example, the ambivalent way the subject holds herself, the way her hands hang at her sides, the creases in her pants, and the way her shirt bunches up around her armpits. The expression on her face and her gaze are caught by the light that spills down onto them and one has the impression that the artist knows how many strands of hair are on her head. Not to say that it is an overly fussy, or even precise work. Nava clearly knows that illusionism work best when softened, engaging the eye in a way that details themselves, slavishly reproduced, cannot do.

This painting is, in other words, the work of a dedicated craftsman who asks us to look at its human subject. No, it is not baroque or expressionist. If it were, it could be dismissed as the ranting of yet another overly-rhetorical leftist. Make no mistake, Nava does take his place in a long tradition of protest painting. But this is what is truly radical about his work: if we could but learn it’s clarity and attentiveness, if we could learn to look carefully—as it does—at what is beautiful and vulnerable in ourselves and others, there would be no place for slogans. What has happened could not have happened. We would have no need to protest.

This review appeared in the Independent at the beginning of November 2006. Because of a glitch on the technical end, it was never posted to the Indy site and so is not otherwise available online. This is the version I sent my editor, not the version that appeared. I seem to remember that there was minimal editing on the version that appeared in print, which mostly made it slightly more pointed politically.