Daniel Levy’s work takes place in a space constructed by emptiness; a void organized by the artist whose initial gesture is always to reserve the white space around the beaches that he will mark. The artist’s problem involves the notions of presence and absence and their reciprocal resonances.

The Masses-Sequences are compositions which develop slowly and raise questions of colors and shapes in their relationships to space. They arouse in the viewer a contemplative state conducive to meditation.

The result of a long and meticulous creative process, each drawing requires hundreds of color passages and thousands of felt-tip pen lines. The colors are carefully applied, juxtaposed then superimposed. This repetitive mode of operation implies great concentration, a particular state of body and mind, detachment from the world, immersion within the work. The artist probes the life of color. Throughout the passages, he modifies or not the color of his marker, this progressive transformation by covering and readjustments is one of the keys to the work, which brings time and memory into play through gesture and perception. The gestures bring the substance to the surface through transparencies. The meaning comes from the depth of the pictorial space and the qualities it takes on through the trance of gestures. The painter sometimes discovers on top colors which were applied thirty layers below. Even more mysteriously, a golden color appears on the surface of the combination of two red and pink markers. The work becomes the place of an abolished time, of a strange alchemy, a magical space of sensitivity and knowledge.

The paintings, which are the drawings of Daniel Levy, reflect the life impulses that run through him at the same time as they speak of disappearance: each color empties and drowns in the superposition and is saved by the transparency of these repetitions. As they are developed – the material and time they take on – the works become denser, sculptural; the vertical masses detach themselves from the background, gaining autonomy in relation to the support. The vibration of the colors and the resulting optical effects accentuate this phenomenon, the masses evolve according to the light, they can give the illusion of floating, undulating, gently shivering in space. The question of the body is constantly underlying: The texture of the material is like an iridescent film metamorphosing under the light, it gives the idea of ​​a skin, a surface sensitive to atmospheric variations as well as to emotions. Through the work, Daniel Levy creates a conversation between the outside world and his inner world, he also maintains a dialogue with the invisible. Indeed, the Mass-Sequences function as a single entity, the mass, divided into two sequences, shared by a space which separates the figures as much as it connects them. This place of in-between would be that of an absence, that is to say of the infinity of a presence which would not be figured but which would materialize from the tension between the two colored blocks. The eye is particularly attracted and intrigued by a singular area, on the internal edges of the masses, which contrasts with the sharpness of the contours. A light area transitions with the white of the paper; it seems that these thin layers of frayed pigments mark the place of a tear, opening a passage for the viewer, between the absence of image and the emergence of all possible images.

The result is only revealed when Daniel Levy removes the masking tape; moment of revelation where the vibrations between colors, the interactions between shapes and white space produce the greatest visual force and allow, beyond perception, to propose an elsewhere, a primitive unknowable, and to deliver a immediate and universal emotion.

Martine Guillerm (2016) ©