Rock Star: Arik Levy’s “Uncontrolled Nature”
Made from perfectly smooth, mirror-polished stainless steel, the sculptures of Arik Levy almost look like rock formations from another planet. “What I make is not a reproduction of nature,” the Israeli-born, Paris-based artist and designer has said. “My pieces are of a non-existing nature. A new genetic code, a new man-made nature perhaps.”
Such pristine sculptural forms—which exist halfway between recognizable natural shapes and the immaculate, otherworldly—are the subject of Levy’s new exhibition, “Uncontrolled Nature,” at Louise Alexander Gallery in Sardinia, Italy. The sculptures fill the gallery and spread out onto the surrounding landscape, their surfaces reflecting the audience and their environment, while absorbing both back into the work, in a duet of the artist’s intentions and nature’s whims. Together with the paintings and other artwork on display, the works trace the artist’s biography, as well as an evolution from his recent “RockGrowth” exhibition at Atomium in Brussels, which featured a massive and colored crystalline structure.
Among the new works on display are the black patinaed steel RockTripleShift and the brass RockTripleFusion Vertical, both from 2014, which bring the artist’s controlled energy into a vertical plane. Each piece is composed of three connected forms, as though stacked, and vaguely human in their proportions. Meanwhile, pieces like RockGrowth 206 and RockGrowth Wall seem to explode in multiple directions. Frozen in shiny steel these “techno-poetic” works lead the mind to many possible explanations: is this the split-second formation of a supernova? A crystal formed over countless millennia? Or perhaps even a yet-to-be-discovered alien element?
“Arik Levy: Uncontrolled Nature” is on view at Louise Alexander Gallery, Porto Cervo, Italy, June 12 – September 6, 2014.
