“I’d like to achieve a renewed inebriation or reawakening of the everyday. Paul Valery wrote that, ‘Seeing is when you forget the name of what you’re looking at’. I’d like this to happen when viewers see my work.” – Elaine Roberto-Navas, Artist’s Statement
Valentine Willie Fine Art is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Filipino painter Elaine Roberto-Navas in Kuala Lumpur. Elaine’s skillful use of colour and texture gives a powerful and sensual life to still objects. Through her signature thick impasto layers of paint, her work, acquire a nervous energy, leading viewers to consider painting beyond the subject matter but also its physical aspect, or ‘materiality’. The richly textured oil paint, layered and crammed on top of one another, almost butter-like, records the history of painting, of how it came to be. These paintings suggest an indefinable, hidden life within the object, and by extension intimate on the human relationship to objects around us: the way we invest meaning to objects and the way objects affect our psychological and emotional state.

Standing Room Only was a solo exhibition by Elaine Roberto-Navas, featuring a series of oil-on-canvas paintings of chairs. The works draw from a set of photographs by German artist Michael Wolf, depicting chairs in China that appear abandoned—left forlorn, rickety, and crooked, and at times crudely mended with loose, rusted copper wire. Continuing her practice of foregrounding everyday objects with painterly intimacy, Roberto-Navas renders these chairs with striking drama and vividness, emphasizing the very signs of wear and damage that render them unusable in the world outside the painting.