In the skeletal spareness of the struts and supports, the painted horizons spread, absorb the cold neon light, reflect it back elsewhere and let their thin skin, a fragile membrane, pervade the wall’s fine irregularities. Around the soft and yet blatant yellow bands, a diffuse gray-violet veil lies – milky, washed-out. The slight up and down undulations in the broad ribbons set off a subtle, hardly noticeable oscillation within the outer contours of the room. The room’s center remains relatively lightless, while the intensity of the fluorescent yellow encircling the walls increases the closer you get until a gentle breach in the dam lets loose a tangible flood. The unsystematic color lines, with a childlike innocent clumsiness, throw their finely meshed energy onto the viewer; they come near to wounding and yet are themselves vulnerable. A double relationship of figure-ground becomes evident: lines painted on bands of white film themselves stand out as figure against the light gray of the walls. At no one standpoint can the color installation be seen in full; like architecture it must be taken in gradually by walking around it. An ‘ideal’ angle of vision does not exist; the work is in a state of mutability, dependent on the perception of the visitor moving within. The inscription LEVI 03, at first readable as signature and date, looses its semantic meaning up close and is transformed into components of the spatial picture, while at a distance it ruptures the traditional color discourse. As in a Faraday cage, high amounts of energy flow around the borders of the room while inside, in relative obscurity, amazing silence reigns, touches of a mysterious sanctity have settled in, breaking up and dispersing any banal reality. The small-space color storms circle the edges, while at the center the eye of the hurricane holds silent sway. It seems as though stimulation overkill is what first allows us to become conscious of the innermost color, the reverse side of light. Internal sunlight is found to be the actual site of artistic postulation where an elementary experience of light and dark, of sign and space becomes tangible. Stillness dominates in this place of archaic magic that avoids the word just as much as depictive reproduction. That seeks out the moment of immediate intensity and dialogue with the viewer and in prelinguistic innocence lets the day dawn on its borders as if paint were not substance but light.


From the German by Jeanne Haunschild


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