For Nave, the canvas is not merely a functional support. It defines a space where actions do not conform to the tenets of traditional painting. It is a mental space, and so the canvas is vulnerable. While he works on it, the canvas is attached to the wall with staples, without a stretcher. Nave usually paints directly on the canvas, without the ground layer with which it is traditionally covered. Consequently, his paintings include areas where the paint laid on the canvas is assimilated into it or appears on the surface as thick impasto. Nave’s painting transpires in the gaps within artistic illusion, exposing the mechanism of its production and in doing so breaking it. The white canvas support shows traces of his act, the act of painting: thinly or thickly laid paint, dripping, staining, erasure, dry-brush painting, or a thick line of paint squeezed directly out of the tube onto the canvas. At times, the canvas size is insufficient and, as he works, Nave adds additional pieces of canvas to it to expand its boundaries. At other times, the painting spills over from the canvas boundaries onto the stretcher.
This is a restless painting dynamic that constantly strives to define or redefine the space, always making adjustments, whose traces attest to this recurring, dissatisfied process. This aspect of Nave’s work is also evident when he uses collage. He pastes onto the painting’s surface pieces of canvas cut from other paintings he made or pieces of his drawings on paper. In Modern painting, reality was inserted into the fictional space of art through collage, which connected painting to the world both symbolically and in actuality. Here, horrifyingly, this connection is disrupted. In Nave’s collages it is his own image of an inner reality that is implanted into his painting, threatening to turn the nightmare into reality. These works convey a split outlook with regard to traditional painting or giving expression to one’s experience of the world. In the space between the Real and the symbolic, they comprise a ceaseless discussion between numerous elements that bespeak, at one and the same time, connection and disavowal. Nave’s painting is therefore formulated as a sequel to a neo-expressionist discourse, coupled with aesthetics of protest expressive of melancholy and existential pain.

The male subject at the heart of Nave’s work appears recurrently as a split, distorted, flawed, at times hybrid figure. He is pushed, raised, shoved – always passively. It is a vulnerable form of masculinity. Mostly, the head is hairless, a bit alien, the face expressionless, alienated, portrayed in pale, sickly purplish-blue. He is unable to find rest. Even when he wants to take a moment for himself, a “time out” for a smoke, to inhale and exhale some air – albeit poisonous – an inscription above commands: Get up.

In some of the paintings he is portrayed floating, twisted, unconnected to the ground, to nature, or to a place. Total Disconnection or The Falling Head Looking in the Eyes, says one of the paintings’ titles. The Grasshopper’s Unfinished Landscape is another absurdly poetic title. Yet another declares, Berlin Falling on Paldi – that is, on the local Israeli artist, represented by Eretz-Israeli artist Israel Paldi (1892–1979). An encoded image of a quintessential Israeli landscape recurs in these paintings – a seismographic line that schematically outlines a long-gone, nostalgic, pioneering agricultural landscape. Instead, contemporary reality includes forays to other locations, such as the European city of Berlin. Today’s Berlin is a bustling, cheap, inviting cosmopolitan art center for many Israeli artists. Nave traveled there for limited periods of time, to work far away from his birth-town of Beersheba. Another of his titles points out, Full to Capacity / Congestion (2015). The fulfillment of his desire for a space of calm and serenity does not seem to be a viable option.

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