From an early age, Ra’anan Levy’s obsession with capturing the traces left by man on everyday objects – nudes, self-portraits, hands, landscapes, still lifes, washbasins, empty spaces, manholes, mirrors – serves only as a pretext for questioning the transience of time or the mark of the human. These themes, which he treats with pastels, pencil, paint and etching, function like communicating vessels and concentric circles, increasing the degree of symbolic possession of a reality that often proves elusive.
With his painting in pure colors and vivid pigments, somewhere between Balthus, Hammershøi, Freud and Hopper, Ra’anan Levy presents a certain continuity with the great tradition of figurative painters, far removed from the formalist and conceptual debates of modernism. His deserted interiors reveal his solitude and his view of the world around him. Alone with himself, he attempts to make each of his paintings a living space. For creative space and living space are intimately linked in his work, which he constantly feeds with his highly subjective vision of the world around him. He observes places and people with extreme acuity. The result is a highly personal and expressive body of work, where each etching, each paper, each canvas is the result of an obsessive adventure marked by such a degree of commitment and passion that Ra’anan Levy ends up embodying himself in his painting.