Nadia Naveau: Let’s Play It by Ear
Jon Wood, Paul Huvenne, Jeroen Olyslaegers
Museum M & Hannibal, 2022
€59,00
Nadia Naveau (Belgium, born 1975) mixes clay, ceramics, wood, plaster, plasticine and found objects to form shapes that hang between tradition and contemporary stubbornness. This combination is reflected both in the way she kneads her materials and in her collage-like conglomeration of art historical references and popular media. Often starting from figuration, the forms abstract and space is created between Naveau’s hand and her eye for humor and absurdity. It results in overlapping languages, textures and contexts.
For those with a bit of knowledge of art history, a wink to this reservoir of images is never far away. From Claudel to Guston, from Bernini to De Chirico. Just as easily someone else recognizes Mickey Mouse’s ears, or the eyes of comedian Marty Feldman. Her intuitively brought together worlds provide fodder for understanding and at the same time provide a kind of “bewilderment” in the spotlight. The glue between all fragments is her outspoken language of form, her hand in the well-sculpted material. As she herself says: “it happens in the clay”.
Nadia Naveau models like a painter. She brings color to sculpture as seemingly impulsive brushstrokes; she paints on and with sculptural material, she kneads color and composition. The pedestal, a problematic element since the rise of the historical avant-garde, is here made independent and thus literally and figuratively highlighted. The pedestal itself becomes a sculpture, autonomous, and again part of the installation. Self-reflection of the medium, in the medium, through the medium.
We see the game of fragmentation, communication, merging and pulling apart in the exhibition space in the same way. The reading of the works is inevitably influenced by surrounding images. Her installations are precisely organized clusters of independent sculptures. Nadia Naveau makes a visual thinking game, a pictorial puzzle full of references to the past and the present.
(Céline Mathieu, 2014)
Let’s Play it by Ear is not only a retrospective of twenty years of artistic practice, but also, like her sculptures, a visual puzzle of materials and references to past and present.
Publication accompanying the exhibition Nadia Naveau – Bringer Together in the Warande in Turnhout, Belgium, from December 12, 2021 to April 3, 2022.
ISBN: 9789464366334
