Drawn Paintings Elaine Roberto Navas 2 April – 17 May 2009
Drawing is rather an off-hand exercise in inconclusiveness, the primary qualities of a thing rendered in a primal gestured marking on paper (is) “transformed …. taking refuge entirely within its attributes”[1].
In Elaine Roberto-Navas’ drawings, these are enunciated in the scraggly threadlike, ruminating lines that coil into a wiry armature fortified by its densely pressed imprimatura of charcoal and ink upon which her buttery pigments would be draped and soon given more verve and fleshed out into a corporeal surface of its very essence.
Her subject matter is what Barthes terms and as can be comparably called as her “empire of things” where she holds familiar dominion over, capturing in the very frenzied rush of her scribblings each minutiae on a pair of well-worn wheel chairs, the ingredients to a dish anticipating their transubstantiation with fire and appetite, the rusted gates of an ancestral house, the discarded toys and dolls of her off-springs standing now at the threshold of adulthood.
The portraits – of her husband in a hospital room, her children either sleeping soundly or gazing blankly for a short respite from their reading, her shirtless dad recovering from an open heart surgery, her artist friends in their distinct postures - are equally rendered with the same ebullient stringing network of lines, each nervous stroke visible and noted as a palimpsest of each hair breath movement of her subjects. Such technique rather lends these drawings as electric, unsettling; their poignancy nestled on the urgency of their hurrying past their very remembrance, yet still pulsing through as though “ …. sustained, carried to the end of a movement which is one of infinite origin, source, and which appears in an eternal state of suspension.”[i]
Barthes further extrapolates this suspension, as an “ … infinite postponement of history”. Thus what Roberto-Navas does to her subjects is to bestow upon them a presence that resists obsolescence despite their mis-shapenly slackened state as they lay vulnerable to natural weathering.
Instead of just glimpsing through the curlicues of each curvature of these forms, our gaze enables us to retrace Roberto-Navas’ close examination of her subjects, as to follow the welling and hollow of their forms, and where these lines knot and unravel, so too, we read the plot of these memories presented as short-hand entries to her visual diary. Yet these are but intimations to her whole autobiography. We are indulged however in her “loving embrace” of her subjects, emblematic of her tenacious hold on the precarious passing of time, shedding layers of our mortality.
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[1] Barthes, Roland. The World As Objects
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[i] Barthes, in the same essay, refers to 17th century Dutch landscape and still life paintings where gaze is objectified in its rich empiricist detail and the gaze is fully owned, by its near corporeal embodiment, by the authorial prerogative of its maker, the painter.
Lena Cobangbang
http://www.mo-space.net/ 
