Piggyback

Navitrolla Navitrolla, Estonia

Navitrolla’s career as an artist began at the beginning of the 1990s. In his earlier creations he already used both naive and surreal elements, setting him somewhere in-between the two style-wise, calling himself a naviist. As an artist, Navitrolla is highly diverse: oil painting, graphics, sculpture, gigantic mixed technique murals. What at first was a rough style of painting has acquired a thoroughly delicate and detailed prowess over the time, in which each blade of grass or a towering cliff in the distance has been processed with a porcelain brush. There are only a few muted traces of human activity in his art, either a cell site on a field or an oil platform far off in the sea. A human city is rarely depicted and when it does occur it is in an obsolescent state. The paintings are mostly governed by the nature and the animal kingdom that triumphs across the scenery, reflecting on the human nature in its absurdity. The artist himself likes to veil his paintings with mystery and, it goes without saying, his art is deeply deceptive: spotting the sky, the landscape and the animals, we settle for what we see without realising that we have been tricked into taking the surface for the true subject matter. Navitrolla does not paint simple clusters of objectivity but complicated systems of conditions and relations, always leaving the viewer a chance either to find themselves in the pictures or to put the pictures together piece by piece according to their own perceptions. In Estonian art scene Navitrolla has occupied the position of an intrigant. During the first half of the 1990s Navitrolla steadfastly pulled the cart of modern art by organising the local art life in Tartu by binding together painting and active arts. Later on, alongside with the increase in his popularity, he was chastised for being excessively commercial by a section of the artists’ community, when the concept of a starving artist being a true artist was still operative. Others criticised Navitrolla for his belief that art is for everybody, to obtain art’s status as a form prescribed only for the elite. No one is left impartial by Navitrolla.