Arik Levy: Art, published as a sister volume to a forthcoming book on
Levy's design, encompasses the last ten years of the Israeli born,
Paris-based, practitioners output. Artist, technician, photographer,
designer and filmmaker, Levy's skills and indeed outlook are entirely
multidisciplinary, whilst his work can be seen in prestigious galleries
and museums worldwide. Influenced by Arte Povera, he is comparable to
Anish Kapoor and Jeff Koons in sharing an exploration of advance
manufacturing processes within his work, often taking the form of highly
polished metal structures. Yet Levy is distinctly committed to an
ideology of nature and natural materials despite his working with the
constraints of industrial forms and manufacturing processes. Indeed he
considers himself more of a feeling artist, this tactile association
with nature fostered perhaps by his background and time spent in
different corners of the globe, musing that ?the world is about people,
not objects. To that extent, perhaps his harmonious approach
disseminates his interest in the difficulties of categorisation within
areas of the arts, where objects, critiqued in often abstract terms, as
being either ?design? or ?art? are judged differently in terms of value,
both financial and critical. In part this argument is discussed in the
separation of his work into two volumes, with the second, companion
volume Arik Levy: Design, being published next season. For Levy, the
world is an aesthetic playground without such rules, ?a system of signs
and symbols, where nothing is quite as it seems.
