Elaine ROBERTO-NAVAS (b.1964, The Philippines) is essentially a sensualist. As she paints, she caresses her subjects with such knowing affection, where the rivulets and creases of their weathered flesh are all the more made corporeal by her buttery impastoed strokes.

Stroking is, however, not a mere incidental verb here, when writing especially of painting, particularly of Elaine’s works. Derived from the Old English word ‘strican’, meaning to pass over lightly or to smooth or to flatter, similarly Elaine ‘flatters’ her ruined and worn subjects with the ‘regal’ affectations of a thing or matter that is so possessed of a life, affirming their very existence in the world, their matterhood and materiality vivified further, in their worn states, their physical bruising, their much use and weathering. This is much evident on her series of chairs taken after Michael Wolf’s photographs where the chairs, mostly contrived from found pieces of wire, foam, cloth, bricks or refurbished again from the discards of Shanghai’s aggressively bustling new commercial economy, are seemingly dented with the leaden anatomies of its sitters. They cease to become mere objects of curiosity for its very form, but curiosities in their speculated personal histories/biographies.

On the other hand, her series of gates are all about surface where object and subject matter become one, its very surface “heavily marked and swirled by paint as it enunciate the incurred scratches, dents and oxidation of the gates themselves. These paintings become stand-ins for the real thing, the gate itself which distinguishes between the “other” and the “familiar”, intrusion from belonging, fortress from a sense of home, a threshold interpolating both exteriority and interiority at the same time. Yet the brilliant luminance of the paint itself seductively beckons, the surface willing to yield to touch, but only in its tactile suppleness. What can only be unlocked are the doors to one’s imaginings underneath these striated surfaces, opening the possibility of narratives but at the same time bookended by this tenuous ambiguity of disclosure and secrecy which the artist has the prerogative to do so for the reluctant admission to autobiography.”

Elaine’s feel for surface seems undifferentiated from the puckered skin of hanging fowls and wilted salad greens from their electric vibrancy, yet viewed up close, they tend to defocus on what’s depicted but see instead exuberance, the delight of its making — manic, intense, matter made oleic flesh, its matter - of fact, meatness swimming in a black roux void. It’s gut-feel painting that eats at our very notion of mortality.

Elaine is a Fine Arts graduate of the University of the Philippines and also a Psychology major from the Ateneo de Manila University. She won the Juror's Choice Award at the Art Association of the Philippines in 1994 and received Honorable Mention in the Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards in 1995 & Singapore Art Awards in 2002 & 2004. She exhibits frequently in Manila and Singapore.

Text courtesy of Lena Cobangbang.

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