Thick brushes and even thicker dabs of oil paint are anathemas to young artists trying their best to be even more photo-realistic than the last one they saw yesterday and probably the day before that. They’re unwieldy, unforgiving, and discomforting to any artist who grapples with control and compulsion. They are wont to spontaneity and chance and to all the beautiful liminal events that happen in the blink of an eye. Since the 90s, painter Elaine Roberto-Navas has trusted her instincts and surrendered early to thick brushes and globs of paint rather than disregard them. With sage guidance from mentors, she accepted them for the material that they are and forged a modus vivendi where she and her newfound tools could co-exist and explore concepts and expression in a visual language all their own over the last 25 years.

This surrender-of-sorts brings to mind Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, which theorizes that spontaneous decisions are often as good as, or even better than, carefully planned ones when one allows a well-developed intuitive judgment to guide them. That development takes many years to master but all that is under Roberto-Navas’ belt. Over the years, her works continue to engulf us in these spontaneous swirls of paint with so much flourish that still seem wet years after the paint has dried. The audacity of her bold strokes antagonizes the careful control of her exploration of themes that tackle objects and subjects, material and message, image and the sensation. Whether from a distance or up-close, Elaine’s works provide us with contrasting experiences that on one hand overcomes you with ebullient colourful strokes but on the other hand forces us to examine our ingrained notions of beauty and decay. Her series of rotting fruits deftly painted in her style certainly makes one re-examine what it is that we label as beautiful. Hidden hints of dark purples and blues in otherwise black papaya seeds are surprises visible up close. But take a few steps back and your experience of discovery is shaken by the image of rotting papaya that’s been left to the elements. Vaguely anti-climactic but clearly effective in challenging one’s definition of what art can and cannot be.

As one of the protégés of the late great conceptualist, Roberto Chabet, Roberto-Navas continues to “show a recentness, a turning away from the past and familiar modes of art-making.” She continues to mine the ephemera of images available on the World Wide Web, appropriating them often from artists themselves and using them as a basis for exploration of new ideas. The current show, Standing Room Only II, follows a 2008 show of the same title where she created paintings of chairs based on German artist Michael Wolf’s photographs of “bastard chairs” in situ all over the back alleys of Hong Kong and China. In various stages of use, disuse, and reuse, the chairs in the photographs are decontextualised from their original milieu and are turned into objects of intense motion within her thick impasto. Skilfully appropriating these found images, the images / objects take a life of their own and for a split second seem to move within these swirling waves of paint that has barely settled on the canvas. The current iteration of Standing Room Only II heavily borrows from the visual cornucopia of fellow conceptualist MM Yu’s vast digital archive of everyday ephemera. Coming from different generations of pupils under Chabet, the resonating energy to disrupt the ordinary is both loud and palpable in this process. The chairs that MM Yu appropriated from her surroundings into her digital realm of expression now come full circle in Elaine’s new works. The works now become overlayed strata of explorations into material and technique, objects and subjects, notions and meanings. On one hand the chairs and sofas evoke memories of what they once were and the lives that revolved around them. On the other hand, they evoke the myriad possibilities of what they can behence forth. Chabet could not have said it any better when he writes in his Self-Interview, “I like the new nostalgia: The nostalgia for the future. We’ve overrun the future. Maybe soon we’ll catch up with the past.”