Barbara Navi, Thresholds of the Visible
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Barbara Navi
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The pertinence of Seph Rodney’s curatorial choice for Barbara Navi’s first solo exhibition at Galerie RX&SLAG Paris deserves recognition. By granting full freedom to such a finely attuned eye, the gallery has enabled an oeuvre to unfold in all its complexity—one that reveals its depth most fully when accompanied by a thought capable of grasping its intimate tensions. Rodney, with the sensitivity of both critic and essayist, highlights not only the aesthetic stakes of Navi’s work but also brings forth its existential dimension: a painting practice that questions our ways of inhabiting time, memory, and reality. He sums up this direction by evoking the desire to create “a fracture in ordinary time,” an opening through which images become thresholds rather than certainties.
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This exhibition shapes a shifting territory, a space where nothing remains stable, where forms seem to emerge, hesitate, then fall back into the uncertainty of their own appearance. Barbara Navi builds her images from an initial chaos: photographic fragments, collages, shards of images, almost accidental stains. From this primal state, she brings forth scenes in the making, whose contours continually reconfigure themselves. What takes place here is not the narration of a world but the experience of an emergence. Navi paints as others might move layers of sediment: she reveals, buries, allows traces to rise again, creating fissures on the surface of the canvas where a possible story sketches itself without ever settling.
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The power of Barbara Navi painting lies in its internal mobility. Colors seem to rise from below, as if the support itself were breathing. Hues merge, cloud, and fade, drawing the eye into a constant oscillation. One believes a motif is recognizable, only for it to dissolve, replaced by a chromatic vibration that transforms its perception. This visual instability is not an effect but the very substance of the work: Navi composes images that refuse completion, as though figuration could only appear on the condition of remaining unfinished, always negotiating with its own disappearance.
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In certain paintings, figures emerge from an almost narrative haze. They seem to come from an event barely occurred, from a memory that has not yet found its form. Aviators from different eras, waiting children, busy workers, fractured landscapes: the scenes overlap like temporal strata. They establish an anachronistic, fragmented time in which past and future brush against one another without hierarchy. Navi does not create imaginary worlds; she constructs points of rupture where several realities coexist, as if the gaze were passing through a dissolve between images.
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This coexistence echoes each person’s inner gestures: our everyday way of looking forward while carrying within us the traces of what has shaped us. Rodney brings this intimate tension to light with remarkable clarity. Under his curatorship, the exhibition becomes not only a visual journey but a perceptual experience, a space in which we learn to welcome the worlds that resonate within us. Navi paints these zones of indeterminacy with an almost organic precision: twisted skies, snowy expanses, caves opening onto the sea, wavering architectures. Each painting functions like a resonant chamber where memories, projections, dreams, and peripheral visions interweave.
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What is most striking in The Life That Is Elsewhere is the artist’s ability to craft images that remain in suspension. They impose nothing; they invite. They open a fissure in one’s gaze, an interval in which we feel simultaneously what has been, what is, and what might be. Barbara Navi’s paintings resemble thresholds: they stand between appearance and disappearance, between clarity and opacity, between memory and anticipation. They prolong within us this sense of in-between, the feeling that life, at times, unfolds in the margins of what we believe we perceive.
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With this exhibition, RX&SLAG Paris reveals how Barbara Navi’s work is not merely a pictorial exploration but a meditation on our temporal condition. The painting becomes a porous site where times, gestures, and voices intertwine—a place where the visible still breathes its own becoming.
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Photo: Courtesy RX&SLAG
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