Elaine Roberto Navas
Published August 24, 2020
Elaine Roberto Navas is a Filipino painter, known mostly for imposing paintings and frenetic drawings. Paintings are typically blown up compositions of overlooked and everyday objects, done in thickly impastoed oil.
Navas has been called a sensualist. Her paintings suggest a control of the medium like a plasterer or a sculptor, carving into and blending with an acute attention for the subject's form and surface, like a carress. This acute attention stems a kind of intimate relationship with what she paints. As she put it, "I only paint things that I obsessively like." What she creates from them isn't slavish photorealism, but a new thing, an other, a startling presence, and an abstraction from things we would otherwise ignore.
This is what the Manila Times has said. Her "paintings suggest an indefinable, hidden life within the object, and by extension, suggest the human relationship to objects around us: the way we invest meaning to objects and the way objects affect our psychological and emotional state."
Elaine Roberto Navas is a Filipino modern and contemporary painter, who exhibits frequently in Manila and Singapore. In 1994, She was the Juror's Choice Award at the Art Association of the Philippines. She received the Honorable Mention prize at the Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards in 1995 & Singapore Art Awards in 2002 & 2004.
