Solo Exhibition · The White Gallery, Kibbutz Hatzor Ashdod · Curators: Dana Harel, Tami Horowitz · 2019 · Photos: Yotam Fromm

In the exhibition Social Games, Guy Levy presents a personal, cultural and social dialogue with Mediterranean society. His works cry out in color. At first, the eye cannot rest amid the profusion overflowing the crowded canvas, the dense composition and the confusing perspective. Then the viewer is free to examine the subject of the painting and try to take in the many meanings unfolding within it.

Levy engages in a dialogue with masterpieces from the history of Western art, filling them with new meanings drawn from the complex culture of the Mediterranean. For example, in paying homage to the works of the great Baroque artists Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Peter Paul Rubens, Levy creates a new reality for figures from Greek mythology. He turns the white marble statues, the pale, iconic figures, into a Mizrahi man and woman surrounded by flattened, stereotypical signs from Arab and Mizrahi culture, thereby directing social criticism at the subjects of his homage. One could argue that Picasso, the founder of Cubism, did the same in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), when he paid homage to Michelangelo's Dying Slave (1513-1516) through figures drawn from African art.

As in the act of painting, Levy dismantles and reconstructs his own identity and Israeli identity through technique, colors and elements. He uses representations of music, architecture, design, literature and more as ways of reflecting the richness of Mizrahi society and culture, which was entirely absent from artistic and cultural discourse: a culture silenced for years in Israel as part of the "melting pot" project. Levy explores the formation of a whole Israeli identity, emphasizing its Mizrahi voice. On the one hand, he reflects the perception of the dominant culture; on the other, he draws greater attention to what it expresses and what it silences.

"I paint like an ars," he says, breaking the conventions of painting and acting from the "id." He paints instinctively and animalistically, strongly influenced by the grotesque in German Expressionism. Levy makes a mockery of social events and scandals in Israeli society and brings them onto the public agenda in a way that criticizes the establishment's handling of them.

Social games, games of togetherness: an atmosphere of colorful revelry mixed with a sense of destruction. Present within them is the ambivalence arising from the figures' mutual definition of one another as "Other," and from the shifting hierarchies of control, roles and exchanges of roles, ruler and ruled, and the influences woven between them.

Dana Harel

2019