Levi van Veluw — À propos — Slash Paris

Levi van Veluw’s world is regressive : his last works reveal the meaning of the first ones, as each new work enlighten the past series ; his world is like a spiral which would tirelessly go back in time, searching for the catalyst, the original substance.
At the beginning indeed there is a recurrent nightmare as follows : in his bedroom, a child is trying to keep glass balls assembled in his hands. They slip through his fingers, out of them, roll and scatter in every corner of the bedroom as the child is trying to reassemble them and keep them altogether.
But there is always one glass ball which finally slips out.
There is no more tidiness, no more barriers. The glass balls roll, spread over, and the child must take them back, pick them up one by one, gather them and keep them in order to tirelessly get out of chaos.

The series called « The Collapse of Cohesion » is endlessly staging this dream : the child’s bedroom — his bed, his desk and cupboard — patiently re-invented, re-organized, freeze for some time in a marvellous organization. The lines of the drawing are soft. There is only calm.
Very soon however the wind is coming with the high tide, the floor is waving and the chairs lift themselves. The bedroom falls to pieces, disintegrates under the effects of the forces of Nature : tidyness returns to chaos, tables collapse, cupboards subside. The glass balls are spread again and the world vacillates.
And the artist is like a child.
Time has brought a beginning of understanding and lucidity to the artist though. And some remedies too : these representations of the chaos are above all creations of the spirit. Before it becomes a drawing, it is mentally organized — Levi van Veluw does not proceed through preparatory drawings : the image, which is mature, is directly and without hesitation drawn on the virgin paper.
In other words, the chaos is a structure. It is an organized chaos. A chaos which is elaborated and controlled by its creator. A chaos that the artist could domesticate just like these bad dreams we rationalize in order to defuse them, to limit them by insisting on their improbability.

And yet, straight lines are never totally soothing. The faces of the cubes are not completely the same. Even the parallel lines may be false.

Then the paper deforms, the wave from old times comes back up, tension is coming, fingers twist themselves, the sway is loosening and the glass balls, again, spread over in the child’s bedroom