"This way of breaking up the form that conforms to the Same in order to present the self as Other means to signify or to have meaning."

Emmanuel Levinas

On the artist wall, Guy Levy presents a handful of recent works. In the two works on display, which form part of a process of examination and development, he seeks to reconsider several painterly languages at once: subject, form, color and composition, reassembling all of them to create a different, new meaning.

In the painting The Bathers, Levy engages in a dialogue with Picasso and seeks to examine the harem of women through a restricted palette, in contrast to the intense colors found in most of his paintings, while referring to Picasso's Blue Period. The nude women in blue are shown in dramatic, theatrical "poses," almost leaving the work's "frame," with a curtain in the background acting as a screen, rendered schematically. All of this is portrayed as a kind of game of concealment and revelation, breaking apart and rebuilding through the combination of dramatic light and shadow in an undefined space. The prominent, clearly identifiable object in this space is the pitcher. All of this is rendered in blue, which, unlike for Picasso, symbolizes the contemporary Mediterranean space for the artist. It is also worth noting that Mizrahi women carrying pitchers were depicted in Israeli art through a colonial gaze, as the exotic, Other and sexy woman.

In the painting The Birth of Ofra, Guy Levy appropriates Botticelli's painting The Birth of Venus (1485-1486). Yet instead of Venus rising from the breaking waves, he depicts a woman symbolizing the Mizrahi woman, inspired by the singer Ofra Haza, standing on a carpet. Two women-nymphs accompany her, as if crowning her the "goddess of music." The Black nymph on the right seeks to wrap the singer's body in a cheap leopard-print fur coat, symbolizing the figure of the "freha," in reference to the singer's Song of the Freha, with lyrics by Assi Dayan. "Freha" is a derogatory term in Israeli slang for a vulgar, cheap woman, used to demean Mizrahi women in Israel. The white nymph on the left offers her flowers, echoing the singer's lyrics, "Come to me, flower seller." The meaning is reversed: Levy exalts and glorifies the Mizrahi woman, reborn and no longer ridiculed. Venus is embodied in Haza, whom the artist crowns the "goddess of music," accompanied by the women crowning her, Black and white.

Levy's act echoes that of the painter Édouard Manet in Olympia (1863), in which he presented a woman reclining in a classical pose taken from Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538). As a provocation, however, Manet presented the goddess as a high-class prostitute, a courtesan, and the Black woman as offering flowers, probably from one of her admirers. The gap between the works created discomfort among viewers.

The new Aphrodite, embodied in Haza, won international recognition through authentic Yemenite women's singing combined with contemporary pop rhythms. This is also a reflection of the artist's own face, of the "Other" within the space of art. In the process, he examines his identity as a creator in contemporary Israeli art, reconstructing the narrative within the local space. He retunes his strings, criticizes and provokes, just as Manet provoked with his Olympia in 1863. In his works, he succeeds in creating new meaning and brings the narrative of the "Other" into the field of contemporary Israeli art.

Aviva Shay Nahum