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| May18 No3 mixed media on paper 40x30cm |
Opening Thursday 14th July 6-8 pm
Stanley Street Gallery
1/52-54 Stanley Street
Darlinghurst, NSW 2010
Exhibition Dates 13th July - 6th August 2016
A FOREIGNER’S GLIMPSE: GEOFF LEVITUS
For Geoff Levitus this exhibition is a culmination of his travels and
research over the past eleven years. Living for different periods in
Europe and Asia he revitalized his art practice by opening himself up to
much older cultures and histories than that of his colonized Australian
home. As an outsider he brought fresh eyes and his considerable
artistic skills to record his experiences and first impressions, though
his own maturity and sensitivity prompted him to peel back the layers
and search for the obscured political and social streams running beneath
the surface of these different societies.
In these works on paper and large paintings Geoff Levitus brings into
play, imagery from Italy, France, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and
India. Borrowing something of beauty such as the iconic flower of each
country and placing it in an Asian influenced white-charged space, he
enters a different realm of picture making. The Buddhist notion of
letting things take their course, dovetails with the flowing paint
methods and guided accidents that Levitus employs to make both his
watercolours and large enamel paintings.
His mixed media works on paper combine flora, newspaper reportage,
finely drawn birdcages, boats, and calligraphy all linked with ribbons
of coloured wash. These are then translated into larger scale works on
canvas. Using poured enamel paint in lieu of watercolour he expands the
scale and impact of his recent work. Floating over aerosol acrylic
painted backgrounds with vibrant gloss enamel colour, he creates flowers
from each country’s iconic bloom, using a marbling technique.
The juxtaposition of poetics and politics comes to the fore in the
way Levitus seduces the viewer with delicious, pinks, intense greens,
oranges and reds, symbolic iconography, folk art and the tactility of
his paintings. He then undercuts that with subtle reminders of conflicts
and injustices present and past, slipping into the frame the imagery of
soldiers putting down rebellions from the colonial past.
Levitus has often used objects as symbols of loss and peril. He
recalls in an interview that his beautiful and often pictured Moroccan
birdcage was found in a market in France. In this finely crafted
birdcage he found resonances with colonized North Africa and reportage
that Vietnamese rebels were carried in cages under French rule in the
early 20
th century. He also includes visual references to
refugees and boats travelling across open seas from Syria and elsewhere
in his most recent paintings.
His residencies in Vietnam and visits to South Korea and Japan also
influenced the sensibility and techniques in his work. The adoption of
the Asian use of white space representing time passing and space
re-imagined, is an important element in these works. As a potent area,
holding spatial and perspectival nuances, these white expanses connect
the disparate elements within the work.
Decorative techniques are unabashedly utilized in Vietnam, Korea and
Japan in the traditional pursuit of beauty derived from nature.
Levitus’s use of polyurethane base that allows the dispersal of coloured
enamels is likened to the shine of laquerwork in decorative Japanese
art and craft.
Overall these works can be seen as a humanitarian stream of consciousness whereby Levitus poses the view that:
we
are all human beings but the conditions that form us are so subject to
the circumstances and the political mileu of each country. We all have a
history that is universal and we should take more responsibility for
each other. In other words, we are all victims of circumstance and
political histories. We are descended from settlers, convicts, survivors
or refugees at some point in the past so why can’t we be more
understanding of the travails of the current movement of people out of
war zones and poverty?
Levitus is a serious artist and emphasizes:
This work is not a travelogue but expresses how I relate to the world. The politics are unavoidable but often suppressed in many cultures that are trying to absorb democratic processes
. In
passing Geoff mentions the aftermath of the Fukishima disaster as
another example of people being displaced through no fault of their own
but becoming refugees in their own country.
He relates to an artistic tradition where artists have often gone on
journeys to disrupt their normal way of doing things, to respectfully
engage with different cultures and thus bring new interpretations of
what they see and understand from this exposure, even though one can
only be a foreigner who is allowed glimpses of the other.
Therese Kenyon
Artist/Curator
Click here to view an online preview by
Artist Profile
ARTIST STATEMENT
"Working often in Asia and Europe over the last 11 years,
I scratched the surfaces to discover the cultural effects of
interconnecting histories. I discovered contemporary life on the streets
juxtaposed with the traditional life of temples and pagodas, the beauty
of visual representations of these daily contradictions, but also the
horror of wars and uprisings largely unknown to the West.
Spending large amounts of time living in Vietnam, as well
as South Korea, Japan, India, Laos, Cambodia and China, surfaces peeled
slightly away, each layer revealing bits of astonishing beauty and
horrific ugliness. The West is now struggling with the tide of refugees
that are partly a result of its own economic and political colonialism.
Asia’s rocky path from colonial histories to 21st
century economic prosperity exposes the huge cultural divides and
unfamiliarity with democratic ideas that are common in many of these
countries. It becomes obvious that we are good at forgetting and burying
history, especially that the history of refugees is a universal one
repeated through the ages which implicates us all. My work is an effort
to confront this reality."
