Katana Angel

A riot of pink and yellow bursts across Robert Nava’s Katana Angel (2018), and from the flare a silvery wing glows brightly. The titular angel may be a mere whisper, yet it nevertheless harnesses a spectacular energy. Centrifugal and potent, Katana Angel is governed by a powerful, imperceptible force, an elemental current that seems to reach beyond the stars. Abstract in image, the work is an early example of Nava’s Angels, a cycle of work born out of the artist’s endeavour to ‘mak[e] new myths’ (R. Nava interviewed by N. Johnson, ‘Enter Painter Robert Nava’s Wild World of Monsters, Myths and Loud Techno’, GQ, 22 January 2019). In the Angel paintings, Nava cites a range of sources from ancient belief systems and prehistoric cave paintings to tropes taken from fantasy films; a katana is the curved sword used by the samurai in feudal Japan. These he distorts and transforms using grease pencil, spray paint and acrylic in bright, playful colours. For the artist, the divide between past and present, good and evil, is gossamer at best, and within the boundaries of a single painting, such forces collide and erupt. Nava, whose work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others, imagines the world as one of flux, where chimeras roam, monsters metamorphosise into seraphs, and the astral can be found on earth.