Press
“Onel David Naar’s amalgams of paint and torn-up posters crackle with the same restless spirit of recontextualization and adaptive reuse that runs through hip-hop. His pieces are records of cultural collisions — everything bouncing around, nothing settled, with art, advertisement, and architecture all competing for attention in the ideological turbine of the modern city. The plantain leaves that decorate the frames of his pictures speak to his background, and remind the viewer that every grand cityscape was built on the sweat of humble laborers.” (Excerpt from Jersey City Times. Please click here for entire article.)
“Onel Naar’s Colgão Diptych (2017) prove the exhibit to allow materials room to breathe and to assume new identities. Deceptively simple organic matter becomes the frame and the image: separated by space yet linked by form. This gentle conceptual investigation of our expectations of fine art with particular attention to the diptych: questioning what constitutes the art object and the auxiliary objects supporting its display. In the artist’s own words, he investigates the concept of diptych in contemporary art to interrogate “the physical and conceptual dualities present.” This duality permeates the crux of the exhibition concept, which probes the notion of seeking strength and liberation through vulnerability.” (Excerpt from Ante. Please click here for entire article.)
“Naar’s work defines itself as a study in juxtaposition. Tabloid images gain meaning in relation to unrelated images, in configurations where past and present engage in conversation with one another. Mass media and classical art communicate within the confines of one another’s logic. Naar does not privilege one construct over another, adroitly refusing to elevate high art over popular culture. Naar’s work shows remarkable insight, revealed through a de-centering the core of art historical knowledge while simultaneously respecting and remixing the art theoretical canon in witty and adept ways. Naar not only performs studies in contradictions, his tongue-in-cheek observations perform acrobatic feats by turning historical precedent on its head and pressing art history forward toward new and evolving relationships within the contemporary dialectic.” (Except from HuffPost. Please click here for entire article.)