Courtesy of Pace Gallery

After graduating from the School of Art in 2011, Robert Nava moved to Brooklyn and took on work as a steel bender in Queens and a truck-driver for a moving company. Now, Nava’s works have become highly coveted by some of the world’s wealthiest, most powerful art collectors, with an auction record just shy of $715,000, according to Artsy. 

These paintings, usually priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars, capture creatures — both imagined and real — in excited strokes of color.  For Nava, the creatures that his work conjures are a product of the intentional and the nonsensical — a tension that he said is reflected in today’s world. 

“I’ve never seen a shark made out of wind before, but it could be,” said Nava. “I think imagination has the chance, and artists in general have the chance, to go to pretend places. They work in the realm of impossibility, where newness and absurdities can come out … We live in a misinformation age, as much as we live in an information age. Sometimes, I think like, yeah, if I see a shark and a frying pan and somehow it works, my mind is like, ‘Yeah, I kinda get that in this world.’ Like the bending of reality.” 

Nava’s stint as a steel-bender at a Queens metal shop was short-lived, lasting eight to nine months. Nava spent the next six years as a truck driver for a moving company, where he would work straight through the first and last ten days of the month, while dedicating one week in the center of the month to painting.

Initially, Nava was worried that his work as a truck driver would hinder his art career and lead to others viewing him as “not a serious artist.” He would dislike working in Chelsea because he was afraid of art collectors seeing him moving boxes, he said. 

Then, he stopped caring, said Nava.

“I think that’s when things got better,” said Nava. “The paintings got better. My mood and the job was a lot better. I had better leadership with the moving crew and running the crews. I was dubbed with a nickname, ‘The Wolf,’ like from Pulp Fiction … I think it’s funny that there were times when I really cared and was careful and cautious about that whole word ‘career’ and wanting things to happen. And the time that I actually didn’t give a fuck about that no more, everything lightened up.” 

According to Nava, this change in approach to his art and career showed in his work. 

While it’s difficult for him to compare the “betterness” of his works, Nava said that his 2012 creatures would “absolutely get eaten alive” by his 2017 creatures.

“If those paintings fought each other, those paintings will smoke the early paintings,” he said. “I can see the nervousness in them. I could see the, ‘You trying to do something,’ and then these other ones are just — they have a different level of confidence and different mysticism going on.” 

While these mythological creatures in Nava’s works have received wide attention, it has also attracted critiques of Nava’s art as “unserious” or “immature,” according to former School of Art Dean Peter Halley ’75.

Halley said that such negative feedback may come from the way Nava’s art attracted likes on Instagram before turning heads in the art establishment, rather than the other way around. For Halley, however, Nava’s explosive success can be seen as an example of the “democratic possibilities” of trends and taste-making on social media. 

“I think the delay between his high level of professional success and … his popularity has had something to do with how he paints,” he said. “You might almost say that people might have been distrustful, because these paintings had such a wide appeal, and that if they did so well on Instagram, could he really be a good artist? And again, when the dam finally burst, I found that delightful.” 

Behind the bold and urgent strokes of Nava’s work, one can find a certain intentionality and a history of formal instruction, said Halley. In describing his own art, Nava recalled an art professor who jokingly told him that Nava was a “backdoor formalist,” a secret lover of formal techniques, as much as he is a lover of rule-breaking.

While some might find Nava’s work “crude,” Nava’s form is what Halley considers a strength. In particular, he compared Nava’s misfit lexicon of sharks, dragons and planes to that of Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

“It’s action painting in that way, reflecting the movement of the body, his use of his tools, the way he’ll sort of let go and let it happen,” said Halley. “I find that a really strong part of his work … A person could also say that Basquiat paintings or drawings were crude, in some sense of the word,  so I think people will be better off thinking twice. And he’s created this self imposed world, that is a little like Basquiat.”

In terms of his critics, Nava remains rather level-headed. Some people like his work, and others don’t. And that’s “okay,” he said.

Differentiating between “good” and “bad” works of art is a tricky task, Nava said. Yet, if there’s one thing that Nava hopes to accomplish in his works, it is to convey a sense of sincerity and offer a “portal” to his viewers.

“It’s hard for paintings to lie and you can see those sincerities, from [the art’s] confidence to nervousness,” said Nava. “To me, making a painting or a piece, that’s the mirror, that’s the portal. So whatever my intentions or my feelings are, whoever comes to that piece down the road in years will have their own collective backpack of experience that they bring to the table and close out the other side of the portal with their viewership.”

Along with sincerity, Nava hopes that his work emanates “badassness.” When asked about this “badassness,” he said that it came from pieces that are “energetically charged”.

He referred to Vincent Van Gogh’s “Wheat Field with Cypresses” as a work imbued with “badass” energy. According to Nava, there is a hardened, yet delicate intensity within the landscape. 

“There’s just certain art that I personally love,” Nava said. “Even though it’s like flowers or something. Like those flowers will beat your ass, you know? They’re badass.”

While there is a heavy spotlight on ‘Robert Nava the artist,’ ‘Robert Nava the person’ remains largely enigmatic and hard to understand — a feature of his that has not changed from his time at the School of Art, said Halley and Sam Messer ART ’82, both professors who taught Nava.

Messer recalled Nava’s time as a graduate student, when he would submit works that did not seem to relate to his assignments; figuring out the connection was “invariably hard,” Messer said. 

“He was always kind of just doing his own thing,” said Messer. “He was always an enigmatic figure, I mean, in a really nice way … And I think a lot of the faculty and other students really didn’t know what to make of him. And you can probably say the same still about him, which is quite a good characteristic for an artist.” 

To eager-eyed spectators of the art market, Robert Nava is a rising blue-chip contemporary artist with  immense capital potential. To his professors, Robert Nava is remembered as an enigmatic, action painter who has created a radical mythology through sharks, airplanes and dragons. 

On paper, much has changed for Nava over the past decade. At his core, however, Nava has retained and remembered earlier parts of his career: his nickname of ‘The Wolf’, his favorite ’80s movies that continue to influence his work and his secret love for the compositional techniques that he learned as a graduate student. 

“It’s a different kind of speed now, than how it was in the trucks,” said Nava. “My dad would remind me like, ‘Remember, when you got tipped an extra like $200 in cash, and how happy you were about that because it would give you the time on the weekend to work more in the studio?’ And so I just keep telling myself, just keep things humble and hungry at the same time. Not forgetting where you come from, but also, you gotta be a dragon.” 

Nava was born in 1985