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The Bronze’s Canticle

A man folded over the effort tries to raise stones towards the sky to erect a column. The second column faces him, finished, decorated, sprung forth in front of an Orient sky with perfect dyes. The heavy bronze doors open and let appear the Song of Songs in the purity of its text, in the shining and intimate dialogues between the lover and the fiancée, between God and the People of Israel, between ground Jerusalem and heavenly Jerusalem.

The words burst on the beauty, the carnal love, the mouth of the mistress, the fragrant oil spread over her body and her appeal to her lover to join.

Engraved in the bronze, the three millennia text of King Solomon always remains new in its extreme ecstasy, sung by two people with perfect forms.

Woman to the right, man to the left, in the full strength of their desire.

By approaching, we notice that these powerful characters, who seem to overflow their bronze frame, are completely sculptured in hollow.

The full breast of the woman is in hollow; other hollows form the muscle structure of the man, their heads, their mouths, their eyes. The miracle of the sculpture, the miracle of the optical illusion, which allows us to see volumes where the sculptor plays with the light to offer an ultimate dream.

All this is only underlining the immateriality and the timelessness of the Hymn. This work is the crowning of twelve years of creative artwork, always renewed, always in progress, from Michael LEVY works….

Léon ABRAMOWICZ

L’Arche

 

The passions of Michael Levy

by Michel Prigent

Editorial published in The Republic (French journal)

March the 27th, 2006

 

The sculptor Michael Levy, the author of Héloïse and Abélard (the monumental statues of the media library at Melun (France)), exposes into the Saint Jean Space of the city (Open Space dedicated to Exhibitions). Inspired by the Middle East, where he lived, by the Bible which is in his culture, and marked by the medicine, which he abandoned for the art, this man delivers us a bubbling spirit and a lesson of humanity.

The last Michael Levy’s exhibition held in the Saint Jean Space in 1993. Since, his sculptures made a world tour, via London, Washington and Italy. Then, during 2004, we spoke a lot about the artist at Melun, during the inauguration of the media library. This was for a very good reason, as two big bronze sculptures welcome the visitors: Héloïse and Abélard.

Michael Levy, as all the famous sculptors, likes wide spaces and impressive volumes. A monumental sculpture does not frighten him. As proof, his workshops are in the cutting of his artworks, so allowing him to be able to express himself through the everyday life in his countryside.

These sculptures, in their context, in the very place of their creation, are even better read. Michael Levy’s workshop is as a theatre within which an opera builds up itself and blooms. The sculptor is the conductor, he works out his own partition, surrounded with his sketches, rough draughts, raw or baked clays. There he is well-advised.  Maybe he remembers from Algiers (North Africa) his own passion going back up to his childhood, always making objects. Moreover this lead him to the sculpture by arriving to Paris!  Then there is his curiosity for the living creatures, the small animals. Lizards, grasshoppers, insects, over which he goes into raptures, in Algeria in his teens.

But this observation is not lost, this lead him to the second passion of his life: the medicine. Moreover, at 26 years old, he told himself that he must succeed in a high school diploma. Then he entered the Faculty of Medicine, following evening classes.  So arrived the synthesis of his two courtships: he became a specialist in joint therapy at the Limeil-Brévannes City Hospital in the geriatrics department. There he realized the suffering of the mankind and there he met with the distress.

 

He discovered as well that patients who began creating found their dignity and their identity.  “They discovered that they knew how to make something again and again. And they even continued to live for the group through their works, while they die”.   The experience is strong. So strong that the choice is made forever. Michael Levy will not be a physician anymore. By the sculpture he will look after someone, but only through the spirit. Then he gave up with his projects of plastic surgery. A real grief indeed for this tender heart!

Sensible that’s for sure. Perhaps even a flayed body in some cases. And so some of his sculptured characters are represented.

« It is to penetrate better their internal world », he asserts, in showing one of his contorted and suffering dwarfs, carrying symbolically all the weight of the poor human condition. The skin is removed from dwarfs, so finally the character comes up into full light.

The veils, he not does not either need to allow to stay dreaming in front of his academies. Perfect nudes with which he took some distance, in order not to fall in an aestheticism which would be only an artist’s weakness.

The new way taken by Michael Levy is far more audacious.  With huge hens pulled by dwarfs, he throws us to our face that we lost the sense of the sacred. We also forgot that these animals, on the basis of the biggest consumption of proteins for mankind, were also living animals. Then, Michael Levy wants to make our eyes opened on to the world which surrounds us. Would not the human become a dwarf, living through the forgetfulness of his own marks?

But there is also hope, and children inspire henceforth the sculptor. In a remarkable and powerful artwork, the children of the Shoah (catastrophe), and his own children too, show him to the everyday life that life is born in the sharing of something out.  Then Michael Levy, who distrusts all the more reason of the aestheticism for the aestheticism, brought up the reflection to the same level as his inspiration, the whole served today by a technique become magnificently evident. You should admire the result!

Open Space Saint Jean March 25th , June 3rd, 2006

 

 

  

 

PRIGENT

The passions of Michael Levy

by Michel Prigent

Editorial published in The Republic (French journal)

March the 27th, 2006

 

The sculptor Michael Levy, the author of Héloïse and Abélard (the monumental statues of the media library at Melun (France)), exposes into the Saint Jean Space of the city (Open Space dedicated to Exhibitions). Inspired by the Middle East, where he lived, by the Bible which is in his culture, and marked by the medicine, which he abandoned for the art, this man delivers us a bubbling spirit and a lesson of humanity.

The last Michael Levy’s exhibition held in the Saint Jean Space in 1993. Since, his sculptures made a world tour, via London, Washington and Italy. Then, during 2004, we spoke a lot about the artist at Melun, during the inauguration of the media library. This was for a very good reason, as two big bronze sculptures welcome the visitors: Héloïse and Abélard.

Michael Levy, as all the famous sculptors, likes wide spaces and impressive volumes. A monumental sculpture does not frighten him. As proof, his workshops are in the cutting of his artworks, so allowing him to be able to express himself through the everyday life in his countryside.

These sculptures, in their context, in the very place of their creation, are even better read. Michael Levy’s workshop is as a theatre within which an opera builds up itself and blooms. The sculptor is the conductor, he works out his own partition, surrounded with his sketches, rough draughts, raw or baked clays. There he is well-advised.  Maybe he remembers from Algiers (North Africa) his own passion going back up to his childhood, always making objects. Moreover this lead him to the sculpture by arriving to Paris!  Then there is his curiosity for the living creatures, the small animals. Lizards, grasshoppers, insects, over which he goes into raptures, in Algeria in his teens.

But this observation is not lost, this lead him to the second passion of his life: the medicine. Moreover, at 26 years old, he told himself that he must succeed in a high school diploma. Then he entered the Faculty of Medicine, following evening classes.  So arrived the synthesis of his two courtships: he became a specialist in joint therapy at the Limeil-Brévannes City Hospital in the geriatrics department. There he realized the suffering of the mankind and there he met with the distress.

 

He discovered as well that patients who began creating found their dignity and their identity.  “They discovered that they knew how to make something again and again. And they even continued to live for the group through their works, while they die”.   The experience is strong. So strong that the choice is made forever. Michael Levy will not be a physician anymore. By the sculpture he will look after someone, but only through the spirit. Then he gave up with his projects of plastic surgery. A real grief indeed for this tender heart!

Sensible that’s for sure. Perhaps even a flayed body in some cases. And so some of his sculptured characters are represented.

« It is to penetrate better their internal world », he asserts, in showing one of his contorted and suffering dwarfs, carrying symbolically all the weight of the poor human condition. The skin is removed from dwarfs, so finally the character comes up into full light.

The veils, he not does not either need to allow to stay dreaming in front of his academies. Perfect nudes with which he took some distance, in order not to fall in an aestheticism which would be only an artist’s weakness.

The new way taken by Michael Levy is far more audacious.  With huge hens pulled by dwarfs, he throws us to our face that we lost the sense of the sacred. We also forgot that these animals, on the basis of the biggest consumption of proteins for mankind, were also living animals. Then, Michael Levy wants to make our eyes opened on to the world which surrounds us. Would not the human become a dwarf, living through the forgetfulness of his own marks?

But there is also hope, and children inspire henceforth the sculptor. In a remarkable and powerful artwork, the children of the Shoah (catastrophe), and his own children too, show him to the everyday life that life is born in the sharing of something out.  Then Michael Levy, who distrusts all the more reason of the aestheticism for the aestheticism, brought up the reflection to the same level as his inspiration, the whole served today by a technique become magnificently evident. You should admire the result!

Open Space Saint Jean March 25th , June 3rd, 2006

 

  

 

PERRIERE

 

 » Beyond the only aestheticism,   the Truth « 

 

“Natural things exist only little indeed, the reality is only in the dreams”

Baudelaire (French novelist and writer, 19th c.)

 

Michael LEVY works according to the principle of the Duality and, for this artist who refers to an Asian spirituality, a thing really exists only by the intervention of its opposite.   So the Good and the Evil engender each other eternally, the black and the white contain each other themselves, and what we see is not necessarily the truth. This is why the sculptor choose to go beyond the simple appearance of the looked object and to try to translate, in his sculptures, the unconscious which we relegate too often in our heart.

 

So in his work on the dwarfs he wanted to represent them without skin, the bark being removed from. As he says by himself:  » the skin is the largest organ, a sort of stopper between the outside world and the internal world. By not representing this skin in my sculptures, symbolically, it allows us to see the inside of the being, a sort of spoliation of the old man. One way as another to make an inventory on the spot and to try to live with what we have and not with what we would like to have. Some of my characters are crippled, but they exist in spite of the obstacles. »

 

This duality, we still find it in other LEVY’s artworks. So are Eve (mother of mankind) and Circe ( in Homer’s Odyssey an enchantress who turned men into swine) , both polarities of the woman, the light side and the shadow side.  What is the purpose of this artist who knows how to ask the good questions? Unite opposite things, find the essential unity which allows us to reach the very middle of things, point of all the possible, all the future.

All these sculptures, all these skinned dwarfs, are in fact internal portraits which concern us excessively of our consciousness and which make us penetrate into a spiritual world in search for a desire of evolution.  So for example Sleeping Beauty, which rests on a base under of which are dwarfs, evokes the dream and the unconsciousness of the human being, as if this sleeping woman peacefully arose from this base, a real foundation of the idea of the artist.

In some other Michael LEVY’s sculptures, bases give keys to the spectators and allow, otherwise to explain, rather to suggest the creative step. In a certain way we can say that Michael LEVY joins the high tradition and in particular Benvenuto Cellini’s artwork (goldsmith and sculptor in Florence, Italy, 1500-1571), in which bases were of a big importance.  The LEVY’s sculptures are as idols, gods of a bubbling world where we would forget the aestheticism to only express the truth which is neither completely beautiful nor completely ugly: it is This Truth. He expresses it in a staggering way, abolishing barriers and forcing us to become aware of the reality of our personality, rocked by a life where the parameters are at least fluctuating.

 

Michael LEVY has the power to tell stories embodied in the bronze, a way as another one to create and to pass on parables which someone consider as prophetic. Then let us listen to him, by looking at him.

 

Patrice de la Perrière

 

Arts News Magazine (in French), n°30, October, 1992

 

Universe of the Arts, (French Journal)

April, 2006

Michael Levy

Reality of the Invisible

by Françoise de Céligny

It is with the merciless lucidity on the appearances that Michael Levy looks at the complexity of the world. Forging his own vision, he transcribes the tears and the human harmonies in a gesture mixed with intransigence and elegance.

He moves forward in his artwork fascinated and doubtful, oscillating ceaselessly between shadow and light, aware of the difficulty to reveal the invisible contained under the yoke of the reality. His bronzes express a magnificent ambiguity built just like the ambivalence of the nature.

Of his first attractions towards medicine, Michael Levy keeps a sense of the observation and an analysis of the bodies which facilitates his methodical exploration of the palpitation of the reality.

His eye is as a scalpel, cutting the suffering features, the desire, the sorrow, the pleasure, and all the range of the human feelings with the precision of a surgeon of the soul. His restless faces testify of the tragedy of the world without losing the track of an indelible hope.

From the workmanship of his artworks perspires an intense sensitive bubbling up between dreams and instinctive impulses, leaving a sacred fire stemming from the magic of the inspiration. Sometimes close to some original magma, sometimes chiselled as precious ornaments, a fascinating profession full of sensibility and aesthetics is glittering from his bronzes.

His characters put in nude, both by the consistency of the matter and by the meaning will without concession, transcribe a determination to work in osmosis with the lively strengths of a genuine creativity. During his artistic progress, Michael Levy built himself an atypical spirituality in agreement with his internal convictions flying above the conflicts of the faiths.

It is with an animistic feeling of the deep roots of existence that he shaped the creatures which populate his thoughts and his artworks. The maimed dwarfs, the fantastic birds, virgins and other creatures which shape his personal mythology, all evoke the multiple metamorphoses of the unconscious capable of dressing the most improbable forms.  Michael Levy’s sculptural odyssey drags us along in the meanders of an adventure which succeeds in rising to the just  » height of the soul  » so dear to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (famous French novelist and aviator).

It is not accidentally if the gigantic bronze disk which welcomes here the visitor carries the name of « Duality ». This only word summarizes the temperament of one of the most talented sculptors of his generation, torn between classical author and baroque, sex and soul, life and death, grotesque and sublime, good and evil or balance and fall.

It is exactly this tearing which fascinates us. His deformed dwarfs, tiny or enormous, thick-backed as mastiffs, with precarious stability, always inspired me a warm and brotherly feeling in their desire of ascent: they are going to fall but they stand.

The artist fully finds serenity and balance only in his Jewish mystic as in this magnificent and majestic tabernacle (The Song of Songs) or this seven twigs Candlestick becoming acutely integrated into the Star of David by a series of bronze links which symbolizes all the people’s solidarity.

 

Marc HERISSE

 

Bronze, fonte à la cire perdue – H 46 x 26 x 15 cm

Song of Solomon

Chapter 1

  1. The song of songs, which is Solomon’s.
  2. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.
  3. Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.
  4. Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee.
  5. I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
  6. Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.

 

 

 

Between Saint-Méry and Blandy-Les-Tours (France) in the middle of the woods the meeting of a contemporary sculptor with a restored chapel.

That the chapel Our Lady de Roiblay, snuggled up in the heart of woods, was reconstructed in 1803, after the plunders of the French Revolution (so replacing a chapel from the 12th century) is on the whole a common event at this time.  That we decide on a day that the road map of hiking path number one (GR1 in France) crosses there, is stemming from a little bit more noteworthy coincidence.  But at this ending of the 20th century, considered as being sordidly materialist, the City Council of Saint-Méry (led by the Mayor Madam Glikson) decides to restore this chapel. So this event deserves that we have a look on it.  All the more when the restoration comes along with an order seeming to take up with the purest medieval tradition: a Blessed Virgin Mary with the Child, partially financed by Esso Petroleum who so resumes the initiative of middle-class person’s brotherhoods or other corporations, sponsors of ancient days. Thus an exceptional event both by its rarity and by its quality; so what! We would have been able to indulge ourselves with some copy of Virgin Mary as the 19th century knew to supply with. And indeed not! We did not hesitate to make an appeal to a contemporary artist, Michael Levy.

We still remember with emotion the exhibition from this sculptor, held at Melun, (Saint Jean Space for Exhibitions) during winter 1993-1994; the quality of the work and its display had made the big cultural event of the region. Michael Levy’s workshop belongs to Blandy-les-Tours, just a step from the chapel of Roiblay; so he could become completely soaked with the spirit of the site.  A place which facilitates the meditation and a talented sculptor with spiritual concerns are ideal conditions for a masterpiece. Madam Glikson did not regret her choice when Michael Levy quickly proposed her the model of the Virgin Mary.

Today we can appraise by ourselves in front of this sculpture. At first the choice of the subject: a breast-feeding Virgin. Rather original indeed, especially in sculpture. In paintings we already find an image in the second century on the walls of the catacombs from Priscillian in Rome (Italy); the subject becomes more frequent in the Byzantine icons; but in sculpture, representations came essentially from 14th and 15th centuries…. Let us leave the art history there and let us come back to our Virgin at Roiblay.

What beautiful idea this choice of a Mother feeder, in the middle of woods! It is all the strength of mother nature, the materialism which we find in the conception of the base of the coat of the Virgin which seems to spring from the ground and become confused with her. We have the sensation to see the sculptor’s fingers working this clay with harshness and energy.  A feeling left intact by the remarkable quality of the cast iron of the bronze but also by the green rust which stresses admirably this effect.

Brought out of the ground, the coat becomes refined as the eye of the spectator rises up. The sculptor begins to master the raw material, making the tool intervene with the most subtle way for a polished surface more and more precise which allows to play completely its role in the top of the artwork,  O! how much symbolic role in this ascent towards the spirituality to reach the perfection for the veil’s folds!

And there is the Child, fragile in his nudity, quite occupied with sucking, with so much greediness and kind disposition as the nose and the fist sink into the breast.  How to think of the Christ when we see this touching image? And nevertheless! Look at the general movement of the Virgin and this graceful swing of the hips, counterbalanced to the left by a flight of the coat’s edge and by a hand which rebalance the whole. An oval is so created, a shape in almond, what we call the Christophany, which usually surrounds the triumphing Christ in the iconographic tradition. Now everything here returns to the Christ and seems to protect him: the Virgin arm roundness, the veil flying away over the head of the Child, the certainly softened glance of the Mother, but with the head full of nobility, serenity, worship.   This nobility, this watchfulness go on in the curve of the right hand, so symbolically long and which in a last gesture full of elegance protects again the Child from the outside world and pushes aside the unwelcome visitor. Because beyond the search for balance, beyond the religious representation we reach a profound reflection.  We see that through Michael Levy artworks, roughness and polished surfaces, shade and light, peace and movement, material and spiritual….  everything is duality as in the rest of his artworks moreover…  everything is deeply thought with such a character!

But I did not describe everything to you: I spoke to you about this breast which shivers under the tissue of the dress, these hair which… No, I won’t say furthermore. This is your turn to discover artworks with enjoyment.  I wish you have the same emotion as me; this emotion which sets in the throat and prevents from saying a word; this emotion which increases us, which is so difficult to explain and from which we smell how much it is a privileged moment, that will never be repeated again because it is about a work of art, unique !

An emotion made possible because an artist put all his skill in it, his experience, his knowledge, his imagination and his sensibility. All this talent transforms a handled subject in artwork, irreplaceable!

Thanks to Michael Levy to prove to us, in the lineage of Bernin, Carpeaux and  Rodin, that it is still possible to create Beauty.

Annette GELINET

October, November 1995

  

 

Knight’s Cross Delivery,  (Arts and Letters )

 

by Sir Jacques BARTHELEMY,

Prefect (Governor) of the Seine & Marne County, France

 

to Mister Michael LEVY, Sculptor

Melun , France,  March the 25th, 2006

 

 

Dear Friend,

Dear Madam,

Mister Mayor,

Ladies, Sirs, Dear Friends,

 

 

All of you know Michael Levy, you know his passion for his native Algeria and his passion for the sculpture, which, from the age of five, made him working with lumps of soap, but also his strong feeling for medicine, which at the same age, drove him to dissect small animals.

 

After having got his high school diploma as a salaried candidate, he became a graduate student in medicine, then in arthrology and gerontology (joint specialist for the elderly). Then he decided definitively for his vocation, the sculpture, and supply since then an original artwork of which we will see this evening some magnificent samples.

 

The first expression of his works, especially in his first period, is aesthetic. His artworks are smooth and beautiful, as his women.  Then we begin to notice here and there roughness, but also fluidities, which mark the subject of the duality, permanently recurring in his artwork: the Beauty and the Death, the Good and the Evil, the Sky and the Earth.

 

Finally, another way will quickly impose upon him, the anti-aesthetics or the difficulties of the human condition. On his creative road map, he shapes dwarfs.  They are small – because for him the man lost his charismatic dimension – and they lose their skin, because without this skin, which is of use to them as a mask, they let appear their deep suffering.

 

For seven years he dedicated his artistic expression to a thought on the relation between human beings and animals. A relation of compensation towards animals, but also a relation of consumption, that the “ready to pack” chicken that he shows represent as protein mass in all countries.

 

By choosing the chicken, hen or rooster, he wanted to show us that even gone bald, this one kept the dignity inherent to the animal, by the opposition, in many cases, to the dwarfish human who lost his (her) dignity, stuck in his (her) dishonest compromises.

 

The second expression of his works is that they are one thing of the spirit  “cosa mentale”  (mental thing), according to the expression from Leonardo da Vinci.  The work of art indeed has a double nature. It is on one hand, a thing, a material subject, but it is also the product of the work of the imagination, that reveals various strata of the consciousness and the unconscious.

 

The material part, we call  » the tecné  » in Greek, meant at that time art and technique as well. The immaterial is the link between the idea of the artwork and hope of immortality, so dear to the heart of the ancient  Egyptians. The  artwork is a permanent dialogue between the structure and the shape. Every sculptor is a Promethean Daedalus ; Daedalus, this famous Greek hero, who had the practical cleverness to make statues which walk, just as much as to give wings to a human.

 

By putting back the human at the heart of his artworks, Michael Levy is   “sculptor of the lights”. In the 18th century indeed the meaning of sculpture is utopia.  This is what differentiates from the sculpture of the 17th century, which was essentially intended to represent the strength and the magnificence of power, which we find in the baroque art of  Bernin in Rome (Italy), or Pierre Puget’s marble in Paris (France).

 

It was during the 13th century that the humanism reappeared in the sculpture with old style productions underlining the human body (Byzantine influence), then in the 14th century, under the influence of the royal art, underlining the elegance of the forms, as the  » Virgin with the Child  » from the Louvre museum representing Jeanne d’ Evreux, Queen of France. It was the period of corporations, the builders of the cathedrals.

 

Then came, in the Italian Renaissance revival, the humanism of the Italian masters of the perspective, Brunelleschi, architect, and Ghiberti sculptor of the doors of the baptistery of Florence, and to the painters, from Giotto, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello and obviously Leonardo da Vinci, who replace the Man in the centre of the painting and so doing in the manifold universe.

 

Also, the realistic representation of the human body through the artworks of Donatello and Michael Angelo did not aim at reinventing the reality, but at reconstructing a vision of the antiquity by modernizing it, so by proving that the Art can change the world. The humanism of Erasmus, of Guillaume Budé, of Thomas More, is registered in the works of Michael Angelo, of Benvenuto Cellini, of Jean Goujon, of Germain Pilon …

 

Michael Levy also cultivates the ambivalence between the symbolism and the expressionism. If his sculpture is representational, it joins therefore in the high tradition, which goes from Donatello or Brunelleschi in the 15th century, until sculptor Rodin at the end of the 19th, notably by the custom of the base, which is a hyphen between the artwork and its environment. The base often serves for expressing ideas.  As Michael Levy’s artistic mind pushes him more towards mystic or symbolic readings of the world than towards the only physical representation, some of his sculptures are inspired, to my opinion, by  » The door of the Hell  » from the sculptor Rodin at the beginning of this century.

 

This unfinished masterpiece involves in an almost vegetal profusion remarkable fragments as the three shadows above the door, which are in fact three different points of view of Adam chased away from the Paradise, the same for the “thinker” who dominates the girder and who represents both Dante and Rodin.

 

Initially imagined on the antithetical model of the « Door of the Paradise » sculptured by Ghiberti for the baptistery of Florence in Italy, the  “Door of the Hell” which marked a deep break in the sculpture’s history is the symbol of the free expression.  The « duality », which confronts the Life and the Death, is the Michael Levy’s artwork, which is most similar to Rodin’s deeds.

 

Michael Levy also cultivates the ambivalence between the symbolism and the expressionism. If his sculpture is representational, it joins therefore in the high tradition, which goes from Donatello or Brunelleschi in the 15th century, until sculptor Rodin at the end of the 19th, notably by the custom of the base, which is a hyphen between the artwork and its environment.

 

Michael Levy does not make differently his looking for  » somewhere else « : you may see all his artworks inspired by the Old Testament, the Song of Songs, or his considerations on the  » Big Architect of the Universe  » whom King Salomon embodied.  But it is also the search  » of the other one  » in his bruised and touching humanity who hardly gets off from material constraints, from historical seabed, from nourishing Mother Earth, in his awkward dwarfs with lively looking who force us to think over our poor mankind.

 

In some of his works, the symbolism of Michael Levy, often associated with the Bible or with the psychoanalysis, is translated by natural elements, flowers, sea weeds, fragments of rock, which support an anthropomorphic feminine shape at the top of a column or of a totem, a symbol of the antagonism between the vice and the virtue, as in the artworks of the British painter William Blake, at the end of the 18th century.

 

He looks often to resume an expression from Jean Moréas (French poet, 1856-1910) :  » to dress the idea of a sensitive shape « . His imagination is not mathematical, as in the works of the Italian Renaissance revival of Fra Angelico or Uccello. His religiosity is rational, as through the Florentines from the 15th century. His representation of the man is not made, as through the Italian and French artists of the Renaissance revival, to value the primacy of the shape and the perfection, but on the contrary to connect the ideal with the poor human condition. It is for that, in Michael Levy’s artwork, that we also find the return of the language, which coincides in the 20th century with the acme (apogee) of the human sciences.

 

The words are, either registered on the artwork as in the « Song of Songs », or on its base, or suggested as in the  » Vanity of the Justice « . The forms show off by themselves, and also they are to be read sometimes. The cabalistic or biblical formulae registered on some of Michael Levy’s works participate in all ways through this spiritual language. The artwork speaks out not only to the aesthetic sense of the person who admires it, but speaks to him (her), questions or surprises him (her), as these chickens with their backs bearing all the knowledge of the World. If this Knowledge of the World is very difficult to catch by people, Dwarfs of the Spirit, it is because the Work of the Big Creator is illegible for the Created Humanity.

 

Thus it is only through spiritual transmutation by means of the artwork, that the human can try to reach the understanding of the Creator’s Universe, whatever is the idea that we made of this Creator or His spiritual strength.

 

It is with the help of the artwork that Michael Levy reminds us this evidence, as Greco (Emilio Greco, Italian sculptor) did for us to understand those tortured paintings, at the time of the mystic trances of Holy Teresa of Avila (Spanish mystic).

 

The artwork arises from the hand of the human who is thinking about the role of the Humanity in the Universe. In that point, Michael Levy’s spiritual and sculptural researches are both so important and so puzzling at the same time, as they send us back to the essential, so calling back to these Michael Angelo verses:    » If my hard hammer takes out from the hard rock such human shape, it is with the Minister who holds it in His hands and guide and accompanies it so it receives its spring; but it is Him who leads it. That One of the Skies, it is by His appropriate virtue that He embellishes the World « .

By handing to you this Arts and Letters knight’s cross, I would like, dear Michael LEVY, to congratulate you on the magnificent work you realized for 30 years and of which the city of Melun (France) accounts for two exemplary representations of « Héloïse” and “Abélard » in front of the City Media Library, but more generally to thank you for the originality and the humanity which spring from your artworks.

This distinction is too modest to reward your merits, I am sure it will be followed by others, with even more brilliant colours. I would like to associate friendly your family with the honour the Minister of the Culture makes you, and your wife, your two charming children conceived in the « duality » at the same moment when you worked out both statues of Héloïse and Abélard;  what a symbol as this coincidence in the time of the creative work as well!

But this medal is also dual. This is the Order of the Arts and Letters.  Arts include obviously the sculpture, Letters send back to the idea of culture.  This distinction calls back to the fact that an artist is inevitably a man of culture who draws his roots from the past, who translates them by his present work, which sends back by herself the spectator to a reflection on the future, on the place of the being in the Universe.  This is what makes the mystery of the artistic work.

Lastly, dear Michael LEVY, this so deserved distinction is handed to you by my care also honours me, because I learnt to know the discreet, warm, thoughtful man, whom you are, just as much as of the internationally recognized artist and the incomparable virtuosity.

As your work expresses clearly you believe in the progress of the Humanity, you believe in this permanent necessity of the rise of the human mind to extract him (her) from the gangue of his (her) heavy humanity. You believe in the virtues of the exchange, solidarity and friendship, and there are this evening many of your friends who accompany you for this private viewing and for this ceremony.

So I shall have met during my stay a man of culture and conviction who seethes with an internal fire which his scissors master, which transforms the clay into bronze as the philosopher’s stone transformed the lead into a golden shot, and which makes a big artwork from vulgar material.

An artist, as you are, looks like an alchemist, who, with fragments of Humanity, conceives a poem of metal which illustrates the human capacity to step up from clay to light.

For all of your talent, allow me, Dear Friend, in the name of  The Minister for Arts, to dub you Knight of the Arts and Letters.

Jacques BARTHÉLEMY,

Prefect of Seine&Marne County (France).

   

The time and the life

 

There is only a single beauty, that of the truth which shows by itself, Auguste Rodin entrusted . (famous French sculptor, 19th century).

 

This magic race in search of an often imperceptible reality began when the artist wanted to use the matter to translate an emotion or express a sensation. The sculptor so intends to translate the secret relation which he maintains with the bronze, the marble and the iron. Then the work of both eye and hand achieves a commitment.

Voltaire (French famous writer and philosopher)  underlined the importance of the gesture as he wrote:  » without any doubt, all the arts of the hand  come several centuries ahead of metaphysics « . Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (French novelist and aviator) completed by asserting that:  » if the sculptor is only science and intelligence, the hands will miss genius « .

Such appears to us Michael LEVY’s artwork when he makes a dream appearing, a myth, using the volume to complete the movement. The deep roots of his art are situated in the precision and the reaction stirred up at him by inspiration and imagination.

He imposes with genuineness a delicate and personal style. He is not swayed  by the sensibility of epoch. He pursues a tradition which goes back up to the Antiquity never undergoing the effects of the fashions. So every generation imposes on the sculpture his imprint.

Michael LEVY’s nudes remain chaste and quiet. They teach us that the body remains the inseparable envelope of the soul, as Degas told us (French famous painter) whose statues cared only about a natural attitude.

Michael LEVY’s artworks always provide us with the weird magic of a secret. Beyond the strength and beyond the magnificence of the forms, they pull us in search for a forever living internal vision.

 

Pierre-Christian TAITTINGER

Former Minister of the French government.

Mayor of the XVIth District in Paris, France.