Jewels
In Nadia Nava’s minimal jewels we find intelligence and poetical synthesis. They are conceptual jewels because they are typographical jewels and typography not only appeals to the eye but over all to the sense it creates.
They are small black jewels. Although marginalized by the white of domestic linen which women would traditionally take care of, women have a secret predilection for black. For example we can remember the great opaque black assemblages of Louise Nevelson. This inclination of the female psyche has anthropological roots: sacred traditions all over the world teach us this with the black Virgin Mary.
In the typographical jewels the offer of punctuation is put to the same body, and precisely to the female body, since it is the woman who wears jewels. These jewels are body art. The female figure becomes a page in a novel. The face is “mentioned”, it is transferred on a linguistic level, as a consequence of her inclusion between quotation-earrings. The woman is a puzzle, manifested by a question mark pinned on her chest.
The semicolon that divides the two ears, again pinned on the chest, separates the tale of the two semantic areas.
Mirella Bentivoglio
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