Art meets science: Ellen K. Levy at Rider U.

There's a world out there, Paul Cézanne thought, that's much too complex to be accommodated from any single perspective. Our perceptual apparatus deals with it more or less subconsciously, adjusting to shifts of angle and gradations of light and atmosphere. And he wondered whether art could take all of this in, could find a language of adjustment on a two-dimensional picture plane.

Cézanne thought this would be tough enough to do with a bowl of fruit or a landscape. That was before recombinant DNA and the Hubble telescope, and before the human intervention in nature created a whole new field of play.

Now Cézanne's bowl of fruit has been genetically modified and laced with pesticide; hilltops are bulldozed; the skies are sweetly poisoned with colors the Lord of Sunrises never attempted. We humans have our own palettes, our own holographic maps and planes, our own spatial wormholes. We blithely create alternative universes, heedless of the only one we've figured out how to live in.

Disillusioned by NASA

Few artists have responded more thoughtfully and provocatively to this new state of affairs than Ellen K. Levy, a New York-based artist whose exhibition at Rider University's Art Gallery runs concurrently with her solo show at New York's Michael Steinberg Gallery in Chelsea. Levy's interest in the ways in which science (and commerce) affect the world goes back to her early training in zoology and microbiology; it was crystallized by the 1986 Challenger disaster, which occurred shortly after she was invited to participate in NASA's Art Program.

Formally, Levy's art owes much to fine art and popular sources: Russian Constructivism is there, with Ferdinand Léger and the collages of Kurt Schwitters; so are Sol Le Witt and Al Held, both influences cited by Levy herself; and comic strips of the "Battlestar Galactica" variety. The crossover between "fine" and commercial art, and the relentless commercialization of the world itself, is one of her principal themes; but Levy suggests this rather by the way she deploys properties of space, form and color than by overt statement.

In most art, certainly of the traditional variety, these properties all support each other. Cubism broke up spatial relations, but left relations of form and color intact, which is one reason why the early masterworks of Picasso and Braque now have a deeply classical look. Traces of Cubism can be found in Levy's work, but chiefly as gestures toward a language so long assimilated as to need only passing reference.

Hurtling machines, erupting engines

Much more prominent is the influence of Al Held, whose large abstract paintings, recently exhibited in Chelsea, create a paradoxical space that suggests at once microcosm and macrocosm: the pathways of DNA and the gridlike structure of space stations; the maze and the void. Levy employs Constructivist elements to similar effect, but in more complex fashion, and with both "actual" (i.e., computer-generated) cellular patterns and images of hurtling machines and engines that erupt through the picture plane.

The trick is to keep these disparate elements in some kind of compositional balance. Levy's balance is a dynamic one, and one must seize it on the wing; this is not an art one can take contentedly or contemplate in a frame. The images (some painted, some computer-generated, some derived from patent drawings) are often fragmentary and clashing; the space they inhabit— or perhaps better said define— is deeply relativistic. This is a world in which everything is possible except stasis, yet also one in which natural generation is thwarted, and the (occasional) implied landscape— for example the Arctic permafrost in DNA and Oil (2005)— is riven, fractured, endangered.

Humankind's desperate quest for oil

The use of the patent drawings, with their accompanying titles and descriptions, is of course a direct statement about man's manipulation of the environment, and the busy-ness of his scheming. Whether the patents actually work isn't to the point; it's the constant drilling and boring and reshaping of the world, of which our demented and increasingly desperate attempts to extract oil constitute only a particularly symptomatic example, that define what, at this stage of late capitalism, can only be called human demonism.

Levy doesn't press the point, but lets the images— often elegantly constructed, although parsimonious (as patent drawings deliberately are) in the information they convey— speak for themselves. What she seeks can perhaps best be called deep background, the place where Einstein's deconstruction of traditional space meets what Joseph Schumpeter called the "creative destruction" of capitalism at its most characteristic. This is culture criticism at a high level of sophistication, intelligence, and refinement.

A first-rate colorist too

I'd stress that last term particularly in concluding. Levy's is an art of ideas, but it's by no means to be confused with conceptual art. She is a first-rate colorist, applying thin acrylics to extraordinarily subtle and varied effect (and color is yet another independent variable in her work). She can also, when she wants to, produce compositions of great formal purity and rigor, as in Three-Card Monte Projected (2008), the initiating work of an important new series taken up in the Steinberg Gallery display.

But in the last analysis, Levy does what every significant artist does: She challenges our conception of beauty, forcing us to see it on new levels of form and spatiation. And, amid the shards of our experience, she offers what beauty always does: a chance to build the world anew.



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