Fireflies

The singular, minute, ephemeral, yet immeasurably precious, lies at the heart of Guy L. Levy’s new series of paintings Fireflies, which explores the persistence of light from within the depths of multi-layered blue color fields, at once direct and mysterious. Comprising large-scale paintings, the panoramic installation articulates the tension between darkness and light not as a binary conflict, but as a sequence of suspension, emergence, and disappearance. The paints, which Levy prepares from a mixture of wax, pigments, and oil, allow him not only to add layers, but also to remove, scratch, incise, and open the painting from within. The painterly duration, enveloping the viewer, is the past of creation entering the present of observation.

Levy: “In the paintings, I find myself in a contemporary nocturnal experience, wherein the entire world has become a single color, a deep blue-black. Within this thick darkness, spots of luminance suddenly appeared—fireflies both soft and stubborn, affirming that life continues to throb even when everything freezes. At the same time, the paintings revisit a field in which the child, myself, got lost—a field that is not a familiar landscape, but an inner space, a terrain of memory. The fields in the exhibition emerge from dark, dense, almost opaque layers, containing existence that transpires between straying and orientation. Far from empty, this darkness is dense, vibrating, and full of internal movement seeking an outlet. The resulting textures are reminiscent of burrows, leaves, grass, water—networks of lines alluding to the field’s restlessness, its breathing, and the way darkness moves from horizon to horizon while still holding light within it.”

In other paintings, Levy places follies—nonfunctional, decorative architectural structures in diverse styles, characteristic of eighteenth-century European landscape design—within blue, quasi-romantic compositions evoking the spirit of the sublime. These structures have long served as a means of fashioning gardens into idyllic pictures, embodiments of order and reason. In Levy’s work, these images of “follies” stand as the ghosts of culture, signaling its fragility.

Philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman invokes the intermittent glow of fireflies—those nocturnal beetles, increasingly endangered, that emit flashes of bioluminescence to attract mates—as a metaphor for that other, unique form of existence which manages not to disappear within the sweeping, homogenizing flux of light bathing everything. Through the work with matter—applying layers of paint, incising, and subtracting—tiny, elusive, prancing glimmers erupt. From abstract depths, Levy coaxes forth sparks of counterforces.

Irena Gordon

Events in the exhibition:

Saturday 27.6.26, at 12pm |  Gallery talk with the artist Guy L. Levy and the curator Irena Gordon

Saturday 25.7.26, at 12pm |  Gallery talk with the artist Guy L. Levy and the curator Irena Gordon