Matvey Levenstein
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Kasmin is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Matvey Levenstein. Composed of paintings depicting scenes drawn from the artist’s life in New York City and Orient, a hamlet on the tip of the North Fork of Long Island, the exhibition will go on view at the gallery’s 297 Tenth Avenue location on September 9, 2021. This is Levenstein’s second solo exhibition at Kasmin.
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The subjects of these paintings are the subjects of autonomy. Atmospheric landscapes that suggest the possibility of the sublime, and domestic interiors with implied privacy and personhood, portray the conditions under which an object of autonomous painting might be possible. Invoking the intersection at which avant-garde cinema meets the tradition of European painting, Levenstein’s work explores and embodies the object-image relationship.
Enigmatic by way of their ambiguous temporality, the paintings share some of their distinctive formal qualities with the languorous, single-shot cinematic takes of Andrei Tarkovsky and might be compared to film stills sequestered from the linear sequentiality of an unknown narrative. When brought together in an exhibition, the paintings inflect one another’s meaning to reveal their hidden connectivity.
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Levenstein’s cinematic discourse collides with the tenets of Caspar David Friedrich in the amorphous storm clouds of Once Again (2020) and the looming crowd of maple trees in After The Rain (2020). Characterized, but not overpowered, by nature’s brooding presence, these paintings play with trespassing the imposed borders between the human and natural world.
These are also works of discipline and considered self-restraint, rendered slowly using a starkly limited palette of oil on toned ground applied to wood, linen, or copper. The slowness or perhaps stillness contained and espoused by Levenstein’s paintings invite interior reflections both formal and metaphysical, further emphasized by the mirroring and distortion that recur as motifs throughout this body of work.
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Matvey Levenstein in Conversation with Jarrett Earnest
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Composed over many months, the works present scenes that can be better understood contextualized by their half-mile radius in distance from the artist’s home and studio in Orient, New York. Similar to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County (the mythical region based largely on the author’s home), Levenstein’s locale is fictionalized as it is transformed. His intuitive sense of familiarity with his subject allows Levenstein complete immersion in the material conditions of the painting wherein momentary impressions of rural and domestic life, such as the painter’s wife sitting among myriad reflections of the interior space (Springtime Flowers, 2020), are balanced between representation and presentation. This practice is further exemplified by the artist’s revisiting of certain images in his work, neither attempting replicas nor effectively trying to avoid them from occurring.
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"Therein is the magic of Levenstein’s seemingly quotidian pictures: the process is the content. If that sounds formalist, well, it is. The art is a product both of experience in the home and without, via the photos and intense studio effort. The artist steers clear of the word technique. But the processes of his painting, its personal investment, are the keys to his evocations of form and meaning."—Jason Rosenfeld
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Works
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About the Artist
Photography by Diego Flores -
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