From 9 November 2011 to 12 February 2012, the Musée Maillol will present a selection of Ra’anan Levy’s recent paintings and works on paper.

Born in 1954, Ra’anan Lévy has lived between Jerusalem and Paris since 1989 and is one of the greatest artists of the early twenty-first century. 

While he continues to work on a series of subjects that have long been familiar to him – dirty washbasins, manholes, empty flats – his latest work reveals a strong focus on water. Water dripping from taps, spilling over floorboards, sliding down barely perceptible staircases, spreading out in stains and forming mysterious halos. Using a diagonal perspective and bird’s eye view, Lévy captures the oozing substances and strange patterns in a way that evokes a sense of vertigo or the sensation of falling when looking at an image. The viewer then enters – literally trips on– unstable, damp floors – into a maze of rooms with multiple doors and windows that are always ajar. These deserted dwellings are like living organisms, the manholes and manhole covers, the sink plugholes become human mouths or eyes; bodily orifices that look at us or absorb us.

No matter the size of his canvas nor his choice of materiel, whether it be oil, charcoal, tempera or pastel, Ra’anan Lévy continually invites us to plunge into the abyssal waters of these vestiges of human existence, these traces of the wear and tear and time inscribed on the walls of houses.