1961, Salt Lake City, Utah) is an American artist, art critic, professor and blogger.

Mario Naves studied painting and drawing at the University of Utah, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1984.

Paint is dripped, scraped, scumbled, sponged, patted and brushed on pieces of paper that are then torn and rearranged.

In response to his 2013 exhibition of paintings at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, John Goodrich wrote of Naves's "change in medium, and a more efficient attack that privileges compositions over texture", ultimately describing the shift from collage to painting as "revelatory".

[7] Jerry Saltz, writing in The Village Voice, twice took Naves to task for his "priggish, stuffy" and "self-congratulatory bitch-slapping.