Itamar Levy | North South
Curator: Tsibi Geva
Text: Yonatan Hirshfeld

These small works by Itamar Levy are mandalas. They are circles. Circles bisected in the middle: above, the frozen igloo of reason; below, the African mud hut of primal urges. Africa is the childhood of humanity, and Europe its maturity. Or the reverse, which is what's beautiful about a circle: above, ancient old Africa, and below, northern youth. Levy reminds us of ancient world maps where the world looked like a flower, Jerusalem at the center, with three petals emanating from it: Africa, Asia, and Europe. Maps that are not interested in reflecting external geography but rather internal geography. And so, North/South becomes both inside and outside. These are beautiful, delicate, slightly enigmatic works, in which it is clear there is a pattern (the circle, the head, the fish, the up/down) and this pattern surrenders to the painter, allowing him, in turn, to unleash the unconscious: wild freedom within a rigid framework.

They say that the English art critic Roger Fry, who was close to the Bloomsbury Group, once fell in love with a young Frenchwoman. He wanted to impress her and gave her an African mask as a gift. He thought the mask expressed wild, pre-cultural, authentic power and beauty. He thought the anonymous tribal artist-shaman had captured the spirit of a death-summoning ritual and its deep meaning—as an affirmation of life and clinging to it: love—in abstract forms, as if with the logic of modern sculpture. The girl, so they say, misunderstood the gesture, was frightened by the mask's wild expressive power, felt insulted and hurt, and eventually went mad and shot herself. Fry, who also had artistic aspirations, designed her tombstone.

I love this story and have never bothered to verify its accuracy. What I love about it is Africa's role as a reverse reflection of Europe, as a wild id hidden beneath the white man's ego, whose exposure is the drama of love, life, and death. And even if we agree that this is a prejudice, the prejudices of a culture can certainly attest to its unconscious. And indeed, complete its missing half-circle.

Itamar Levy's paintings are mirror duplications of North/South that repeatedly fail to be exact reflections precisely because the metaphors of North as "up" and South as "down" collapse within them. And it is clear that they will collapse, because in truth this sphere is round; it has no "up." And the metaphorical meanings of this burden easily collapse. Lo and behold: Africa is the bottom and the urge. Africa is the continent at the top and the head. And the African head is a dreamer. Inside and outside. The head is an eye, it's a fish, it's an egg, and the egg is the bottom. And so on.

Perhaps it can be formulated this way: houses reflected in a river in a Poussin painting. For a fleeting moment, it seems as if the painting could be inverted and remain the same. The clouds in Monet's water lily pond in Giverny: for a fleeting moment, it seems there is no up and down here. But there is. There is a line. There is a horizon line. A middle line. A breaking line: above, Monet, and below, the denominator. A line crosses the Earth: from the south, one world, and the north, another. This is the belt worn by Hasidim symbolizing the bisection of the body: below, urges and the Africa of the body; above, reason and the Europe of the soul. And this, of course, is also the basic religious metaphor: God in heaven above, and below, Sheol. But let's dwell on this very image for just one more moment: God in heaven above. But the sphere is round. The sky surrounds it. The meaning of this simple fact is that, at any given moment, there is more sky below you than above you.