Nature is said to be a place not for us. Throughout the history of classical painting, nature is portrayed as a faraway place, a distant background, oftentimes viewed through a window or an arch, or from a threshold or a ledge, so as to separate our secure interior world from the unpredictable outside forces of nature. From the sublime Chinese ink landscape paintings to the brooding canvases of the German Romantics, nature is a metaphor for what is essentially an unknown and uncharted territory, often overwhelming and sometimes terrifying. Similarly, contemporary German photographer Thomas Struth says of his series of pictures of forests, “Paradise was never a place one could enter.” While the images bear the specificities of their location, the dense entanglement of branches, leaves, roots, trunks, and vines is a filter that screens out its own further reading. Struth adds, “One can spend a lot of time in front of these pictures and remain helpless in terms of knowing how to deal with them.”

Elaine Roberto-Navas’ latest suite of five paintings for MO_Space appropriates three of Struth’s Paradise pictures taken in Australia and Brazil, along with two based on photographs that she and her husband Rene took of the forest beside their high-rise apartment in Singapore. Entitled Innate, the exhibition uses the Edenic image to confront what is considered natural and real. The large-format paintings are self-contained environments rendered in her signature all-over impasto technique, heavy and dripping with a physical presence like the monsoon and tropical storms. But apart from connoting something that is a given or is intrinsic, ‘innate’ as a term also suggests a process that is mentally constructed, ‘originating in or arising from the intellect or the constitution of the mind, rather than learned through experience.’ Based on existing photographs, Roberto-Navas’ paintings are predetermined images that suggest that nature is a fabrication, a mental scenery that is both a mirror and measure of our own inner psychic geographies.  

Struth elaborates on this in his photographs, “I didn’t want to portray a specific place, that specific forest. Rather, I was trying to feel, within its primeval branching, the moment of beginning that once was the world. I also avoided pictures that would evoke exotic fantasies or look like botanical gardens. Actually, I don’t even see the images as depictions of nature. The theme may play a major part, but the undertone makes the music. It’s about the experience of time as well as certain humility in dealing with things. It’s a metaphor for life and death.” Roberto-Navas’ paintings, like Struth’s photographs, offer no idyllic escape but are actually part and parcel of the artist’s own familiar trappings. Right outside Roberto-Navas’ window is a sprawling jungle that serves as her immediate environment. As with nearly everything in Singapore, this jungle does not seem wild and foreboding, but almost landscaped and tamed to co-exist with the modern buildings planted right beside it. Three rooms of Roberto-Navas’ home have a view of the jungle’s canopy: her bedroom, the living room, and her studio, where she spends most of her time alone, painting.

Other objects within her sight / home likewise have become subjects for her works. Stuffed animals and toys, once favorite companions of her children who have now grown up, uneaten fruits and vegetables that rot in the kitchen, broken furniture, homework left undone on the table, or even a mentor at different stages in his life: all suggest the passing of time, scenes from an interior world fraught with everyday disquiets and tremors. Like the early Dutch still-lifes, the objects depicted in her paintings serve as articles of vanitas, which in Latin translates to ‘emptiness,’ reminding us that all life is fleeting and momentary. By painting these anxious images and objects of transition, Roberto-Navas gives them a concrete presence and resonance that is clearly more sensed than understood. Despite the lush foliage and the frenetic brushstrokes, Roberto-Navas’ forest paintings are non-sites and empty spaces that meet and direct the viewer’s gaze back to the self. Like a meditation pool or a Zen garden, they are created in such a way as to “elicit a moment of stillness or an internal dialogue.” As Struth says, “You have to be able to enjoy this silence in order to communicate with yourself—and eventually with others.” As a point of departure for transformation, these images ground us with a better sense of self and place within a highly frantic and changing world.