by Jacqueline Burckhardt

Spray painting, the medium of a clandestine graffiti scene from the spontaneously rebellious street-subculture, has for years been part of the public discussion within the art world and outside it.

Renée Levi’s spray works, which represent her most important work complex from the past years, have come about from the inner dialogue between Levi the artist and Levi the architecture graduate who glances sideways at socio-cultural contexts. The dialogue from this double perspective is analytical and emotional, and crucial for the ever self-assured immanence of her grandly executed interventions. It is not the primacy of a harmony between architecture and art that is sought. It is much more the case of giving a wall painting (like that in the main hall of a UBS bank in Basel) a challengingly irritating effect. Interior axes are shifted, doors and ventilation devices negated while, on the other hand, four closed-circuit video cameras, normally discreetly camouflaged, are celebrated. Characteristically, the name of this work is Eyes.

In any case the point is: this art is not domesticated to fit its surroundings, but clearly transforms the identity of the same. New arenas are unearthed, not illusionistic picture rooms, but spatial pictures and color spaces, stimulating zones of arousal, force fields, mental spaces full of energy. Levi generates these with a spray can as her chosen tool, one she manipulates dancingly, as it were, in a gesture of variable rhythm. During this physical performative act, she plays on expansive wall surfaces, panels or lengths of paper. As small as is the expenditure of time and material, all the greater the effect. Her works are propulsions, and are so in a literal sense, for with the force of the propellant the paint settles, or floats, lightly onto the picture plane, also onto those surfaces to which no brush application would adhere. A character of the fleeting and the transitory clings to these structures out of air and paint, as if they did not want to occupy one place forever and unchangingly, as if for a time they had found a suitable place to land – weightlessly like flying carpets.

This delight in movement is carried over to the viewer. Nobody stands still before her installed works. Close up, the spray act is for the most part retraceable. Holding your breath up to 18 seconds recapitulates how long the spray nozzle was held down, where the can was set in motion and how fast and from what distance it was guided. In depictive eruptions this energy finds its form with a passion – but as this specific technique demands – kept under control. Today the artist has become a virtuoso in her handling of the spray can and with it conjures up a fine mist, setting down color intensity and form instantaneously in precise gestures. But this has nothing to do with an act of bravura. It is a natural prerequisite, so that full concentration is given to form and surface.

The colors sprayed are garishly bright, often fluorescent, and by nature demand latitude and attention. Accordingly the texture of the linear drawing is expressive, handwritten and – though almost immaterial – arouses not just our optic nerves. On the picture ground, which she often keeps in co-equal play, its effect is physically palpable. This vibrant painting reflects a visual experience with film and television, since it appears at times like an instant take of a virtual image that has for one moment gained physical mass. That it is the color’s own energetic light that lends the picture its animation is conclusively evident when Levi applies paint that is phosphorescent, the kind that turns out to be nocturnal and expires when all the others shine forth.

Two orange fluorescent works lure us to the most adventurous of visions. One was on exhibit at Art Unlimited 2001 in Basel, the other with the title Oranges from 2002 was applied to the ceiling of the Hochschulrektorenkonferenz und Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes in Bonn. Both unfold into a tangle of galvanized fibers, pleats, growths, bulges, whorls and swellings. Tissue-like, turbulent, ordered systems are in part compressed and held in a state between becoming form and shedding form. They manifest the wild associations of a giant drawing of a brain, a close-up of a nascent star or a view onto an unlimited, chaotic labyrinth.

Levi’s spray works, created out of the standard work material from do-it-yourself shops, open a door onto an arsenal of images from early civilizations, probe elementary signs that have been absorbed into our collective memory since time immemorial and tell of energies that are ice-cold as well as glowing-hot. They contain signs that are also the basis of a culture of ornamentation. The universe of the ornament – one of the sources of abstract, non-figurative painting and a theme that has been thoroughly highlighted in the digital picture world – has also been a fundamental inspiration for Levi. Her clothes alone testify to this, as does her choice of drapery material for a percent-for-art-program work from 1996 that brings the façade of an apartment building to life, or assemblages from 1997 of patterned rolls of wallpaper that she pins directly to the wall.

Levi reverts back to a pictorial vocabulary that is unencumbered by formal or symbolic orthodoxies. Although the atmospheric harmony and compositional structure in each of her works is intentional, its formulation, on the other hand, is a result of the link between elements that are consciously manipulated and others that are spontaneously improvised and seem to organize themselves dynamically on their own, as though her hand were at times guided by an anarchic impulse.

Levi speaks several languages in word and picture. She was born in Istanbul, heard Ladino, French, Turkish spoken around her. Since a child of four she has lived in German-speaking Switzerland. Thus her art is rooted in several cultures, to which her name too is testimony.

From the German by Jeanne Haunschild


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