Silverlens presents Bart’s Homework at 20SQUARE, where Elaine Roberto-Navas does her assignment after her son’s geometric creations. Moved by the shapes Bart made out of paper and clear tape, the artist employs characteristic impasto, by which she brings life and movement into lopsided cones, cylinders, and prisms.

As if struggling to prop themselves up on top of each other, the series of patched-up shapes Navas paints are configured and rendered into “frankensteiny” pictures. She calls her work “a refreshing exercise” as painting the basics brings back old art school homeworks, and allows her to remember one of the very first things she's learned: “If you could draw these shapes, you could draw anything.”

With heavily-layered strokes, Navas pays homage to the primitive, to basic forms, by capturing clumsy curves and crooked angles. Her works become distinctly human interpretations of math’s calculated shapes. Bart’s Homework presents a melding of contradictions—where a highschool project inspires a seasoned artist’s work; the smooth swirling of paint clashes with harsh edges and the peaks of geometry; monochrome still lifes are composed with kinetic vibrance; and the childlike representation of forms is executed with mastery.