by Christian Bernard

The question of gesture in painting, that is, the movement of the painter’s hand, the painter’s "gesture,” deserves to be reconsidered today in a wider perspective, especially beyond the sole field of what is called gestural painting in the strict confines of Abstract Expressionism’s historical moment. Lichtenstein’s brushstrokes, which were mere images of gestures, sounded the death knell of expressive gestures. Their subsequent reactivation by Richter reinvested them in the material and surface of the picture while retaining that cold, citational and iconic – if not ironic – character. And it is well known that Pollock’s drippings, with their element of chance, could be read as an indirect critique of the heroic gestuality that was contemporary with Pollock’s work – to mention only a few "logothetes” here.
However one wants to view it, the same now holds for the painter’s gesture as for the abstract picture: they are always already images, stale simulacra, of gestures and pictures. The mirror fate of these two elements of modern art only finally earned widespread acceptance – to the point of stuttering recognition – in the mid-1980s, yet in no way does that fate signify some kind of end of painting. Rather it spells the end of painting’s innocence or at least the end of a certain romantic belief in its innocence. This is nothing to deplore, nothing but a chance for a certain lightness or defascinated liberty to arise.
The true modern hero is anti-aristocratic and the painter of contemporary life is calmly prosaic. The more memory he has, the less he is in mourning. Humor protects him from illusory excitements, the intuition of history doesn’t leave him vulnerable. Even when slight, the new perspectives this intuition opens for him suits the exercise of his wised-up sovereignty. When it is not busy with more or less naively warming up leftovers, the supposedly "nonfigurative” painting of our day and age, i.e., the part of it that is still exciting, often seems to enjoy an amused composure, a mischievous intelligence.

The same goes for Renée Levi’s recent work in my opinion. Levi came to painting from architecture early on to venture along the trails she might blaze once she had dispensed with the traditional structure of the painting. She concentrated, for example, on the free colored plane, which took the form of painted monochrome cardboard or sheets of paper set out, arranged or displayed in various ways. The contingent concrete venue was only tangentially put to use (Dely, 1992 – 1993, and Vordemberge-Gildewart, 1994). The artist likewise investigated in passing the pleasant readymade resources of real wallpaper and printed fabrics. Painting is everywhere you find or "see” it (Bildfassade, 1996).
Levi also stood her message on its head by filling space up with ample monochrome volumes that seemed to weigh heavily upon the ground. And if their three-dimensional nature was not enough to make them sculptures, their forceful color set them squarely in the world of painting (Red Cubes, 1994 – 1996). Soon color alone, or nearly, would be enough for Levi. The question of the support, of its nature or form, was to fade before the question of surface. With the oblique mosaics of Farbraum (1995) or the phosphorescent applications of Simply Green (1996 – 1998), the field of the wall offers a site that is in keeping with the artist’s predilection for the experience of color.
What remains of painting when it does without the picture-object or its substitutes and off-shoots? The wall, the extensive flat surface, the panel. In other words, the fore- and background of habitation. Pictures were a movable synecdoche of that. What remains of color when it passes up variations of tone and tint, the glaze, the aplat, the touch or impasto? The monadic impression, such as Toroni employed it as an overall covering, or the single, monochrome line. Thus, in the course of her analytical jubilation, Levi recently found herself facing the bareness of the simple line. But rather than abandon that in the play of color, she devoted herself to inventing a painterly gesture of drawing – as if giving painting itself a new beginning for less the cost but without any ascetic mytheme, starting with drawing alone. A limpid outcome to an ancestral conflict.

Various works seemed to have prepared this crucial moment, including certain drawings on paper (like that 1995 drawing in orange felt-tipped pen that is reproduced on page 15), the jumble of shreds, strips and ribbons of cut-out colored paper (23. November, 1995, and Ball 3, 1997), the printed curtain motifs livening up the sides of the Dreirosen-Klybeck building in Basel (1996), and above all the Steps mural (1998 – 1999), which Levi created in a Zurich clinic. There the dominant formal element is a blue "handwriting” made up of cursive scribbling, nervous scratches, hasty crossing out and other frenzied traceries speckled with blots and spots that slipped from Levi’s pen. The motifs recall those sheets of paper for testing pens, the drawings on which, at times so uncommon and odd from the aesthetic point of view, are mindlessly scrawled without ever being viewed as such and produced with no other intention than to test the suitability of the instrument to the hand trying it out. Here the modus operandi is foreign to the wall and the drawing only takes shape there through an enlargement, a dual operation of translation.
With mural artworks like Stilleben (Zurich, 1999), Eyes (Basel, 1999-2000), Passage jaune (Mouans-Sartoux, 2000), 3 x 4 m (Basel, 2000), Berman was here and Pera (Geneva, 2000), Pera 2 (Basel, 2000) and Clémentine (Paris, 2001), Levi perfected the device of "drawn painting” that already stands as a remarkable contribution to the debate over painting’s possibilities on the beginning of our new century. Levi’s approach is characterized by a drastic economy of means. The support is provided by the wall itself of the exhibition venue or by great strips of thin wood that either are affixed there or form a separate space inside the venue. The surface treated, often in its entirety, is that of the walls or panels themselves. The color – red, orange, yellow, which sometimes come in fluorescent hues – is made up in fact by the lines of the drawing that are lightly applied with a spray purchased from a retailer.
We are closer here to the process of graffiti or tagging than the painter’s "profession.” This categorical option is very significant of course: no fetishism here, no overinvestment in the pictorial material, no addiction to subtleties of color. This obvious simplicity rejects all illusionism, this apparent critical dearth all display of mastery. As ambitious as it is, Levi’s art is always anti-authoritarian. The same holds for the draftsmanship itself, which endlessly exposes the fluid movement of its unfolding.
Neither expressive jolts, nor hysterical seismography, just the development of lines that are constantly being started over again, calm proliferations (no lyrical pathos), or winding outlines (boustrophedon), approximate patterns or filler grafted with seemingly awkward alterations, nonchalant zigzags or twisted blooms – just the half-improvised half-foreseeable course of a formal reverie that is loose and not without its fun as it wanders through its maze. Humor in this instance, however, is an ethical courtesy. We size up the subtle dialectics of attention and detachment implied by these regular gestures that are devoid of any perceptible effort, i.e., devoid of any effects of an effort on the artist’s part, almost idle, neutral, slow, sometimes nearly choreographed, too.
They begin a particular mode of covering a surface in which the untouched white forcefully interacts with the vividness of the drawn color and the coloring drawing. This also results in a rare luminous intensity that extends into the space the area of these paintings’ visual propagation, suggesting for example the color volumetric expansion of a Dan Flavin’s fluorescent-tube works. Not surprisingly, the artist used the notion of Farbraum as a title for one of her pieces.
Furthermore, the care taken in treating both the juncture-breaks of the angles and the juxtaposition of the panels reveals a rhythmic intention as well as a discerning sensitivity to the classic problem of edges, limits and borders. These murals seem to discreetly recollect the constraints of paintings. Their open field, which exists on a life-size architectural scale, doesn’t become oceanic for all that. It remains clearly structured internally, that is, the site of this work is not confused with the work done to the site; it always maintains a sufficient liberty of composition.

It should be clear that we are a far cry here from the dogmatism of formalist reductions like the "drop everything” of certain postmodern resignations or the shopkeeper management of post-Richter artist-franchises. Like artists as varied as Bernard Frize, Bernard Piffaretti or Christopher Wool (who limit themselves to paintings), Renée Levi, employing the paradoxical resources found in the strength of the weak, has probably managed to discover in her "painter’s gesture” a true "Northwest Passage” towards a renewed use of painting, one that is distanced, sober, serene – and expanded this time to the viewer’s entire space.


From the French by John O'Toole


Catalogue:
Renée Levi. Kill me afterwards
Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg
Museum Folkwang Essen
2003