Traces of movement. Numerical series. Point by point compressions. Block-wise emplacements. Interlaced networks. Lanes of color fog. Filigree shoots, coral-like. Curvatures, ascending in free fall. The states of order that Renée Levi designs in her drawings are in order – until further notice. The gesture she accomplishes extends to the geometry of the picture plane on which it becomes visible and to the signals of energy that are at home in their own order of space and time. These drawings are not simply studies or preliminary sketches for paintings, but work up a matrix from which the single sign can unfold into form.
Magenta, orange-red, yellow-green, brown-to-transparent. On white, against white, with white: the scale of the tones in which Levi’s signs win through to language seem stretched to the utmost. The field in which they have been set, on the other hand, is indeterminate, free, open. Not an empty sheet of paper, but an aura, dematerialized at the moment color touches it. A touch that sets off an interaction, which is staged at times as counterplay, at times as collaboration. Though never merely a graphic figure on blank ground. More a burst of sparks from the collision of two different states of material aggregation. Intensity of the effect that lights up like a flash and catapults perception into the dimension of instantaneity. Challenges. And that entirely simple.
Sprayed, dabbed, sketched, drawn along by brush. Each sign a rhythmizing of the field. Dynamic figuration that – even when it goes its own serpentine way – never turns into an arabesque, but marks points of concentration. Out of fullness into openness. Tension at the highest level, yet mistakable for a point of repose. The field, a zone of power that radiates outwards in all directions. Even beyond the borders of the paper. Boundlessness as a counterweight to concentration. And a gaze free of fixation to place. Yet the paper is not merely a sheet cut out of the breadth of infinity. What is tangible is the compression of the instant into image. Only the imagination escalates.
No titles, names, dates. Unstoried drawing sheets that convey stories. Like light reflections that shine on unknown terrain. Poetry without words. Radiuses of source, sign and meaning. Picture, in fact. Speech come to light, rather than narration. Placement in the room. Reflections of the present. Immediacy infixed in the work and yet more than mere effect. Concordance rather than temperament. Chance seems to have no place. In preference, the controlled flow of formative intuition, seizing the moment. Reduction to the essential paves the way for observation and self-observation. Discipline and freedom linked inseparably. Push the boundaries, play upon the boundaries, boundless. Forget knowledge, dare practical experience – let reality emerge.
Experiment, demand, question, seek. Test material, while thinking and acting. Dare the simple. Do not shun empty space. Set down and reject. Kill me afterwards. An after that does not actually exist. The sign remains ever present, even when its graphic appearance pales. Powerful lines that grab space, peripheral, imaginary, fundamental. Released from the weight of matter. Just like her large works on walls. Phenomena and contexts. Exercises in the dimensions of an apparition. The reality of the effect is tested, beyond speculation. Instead the guts to take risks. The will to go all the way. For only in the fusion of field and inscription, boundlessness and concentration, stability and instability can the whole take on form as the sign of the times.
The symmetry of flow, free rhythm, points of suspension, repetition. A presence in which what-was contracts so as to wave what-is-becoming on its way. The movement of signs, both design and theme. Futurity needs beginnings. And with no Now, no Soon. Whenever flow and suspension interpenetrate, moments of simultaneity arise. On the terrain of immediate presence, something past traverses something future; projects become akin to reconstruction. The field as an energetic space in which the sign reveals its temporality. This way now, soon to be different. Permanent transformation becomes possibility and yet remains definitive. For tension keeps movement within the moment, passes the fleeting on to the constant.
Their gaze open, turned away from language, Renée Levi’s drawings are balanced on the brink of intelligibility. As manifestations of a way of articulation whose expressive will is programmatically formulated in lanes of color fog, sidelights prove to be meaningful – no more, but also no less. The deep meaning, a chimera that is counterposed against any thinking about the order of the sign. The artistic gesture hereby spurs on a double interest, on one hand the wish to discover the rules or principles that stamp the sign complex. On the other, to set down and learn from impulses in which the order of the signs can be experienced as a live association. Drawing as the setting down of signs, out of whose state of order the hierarchies of meaning and form are about to vanish.
Beyond hierarchy when the door to order opens, the suspension of boundaries is a recognizable possibility. Games of fantasy. Active thinking. Perception of the Other, altered perception. The gaps that surface between the signs are made available as areas of freedom, experimental fields for the eye as well as for the mind. Research of a logic that does not build on the laws of cause and effect, but tries to integrate the paradoxes of experience. Fields as states of order of a third kind in which signs so not stand first of all for something or speak of something, but define themselves as the open Other. No conclusion possible. Instead movement, each and every time.
From the German by Jeanne Haunschild
Catalog:
Renée Levi. Kill me afterwards
Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg
Museum Folkwang Essen
2003