INTERNAL BALANCE: ARIK LEVY
September 10 - October 17 , 2026
The
first encounter with Arik Levy's sculptures feels like a kind of vertigo. Forms
stacked and balanced on top of each other, teetering on the verge of tipping,
then holding back, settling into meditative silence. A particular quality of
stillness inhabits his work. Meditative and awe-inducing at once, they play on
the senses before they play on the intellect. What these works first and
foremost evoke is a sense of balance—a living equilibrium, fragile, dynamic,
and constantly remade.
Levy's
path as an artist was far from conventional. Being dyslexic, he learned early
on that form could express what words could not. This became the very principle
that has guided his practice. Before setting up his studio in Paris, which is
today an addition to his Sculpture Park in St-Paul-de-Vence, South of France,
there was the surfboard. In lieu of a traditional canvas, its surface was where
he first explored the depths of his imagination. Following a stint as a set
designer for contemporary dance and opera, his approach evolved; form and space
became inseparable, and scale became the very medium.
This
relationship with scale and verticality is felt most immediately in the Rock
series. RockFormationTower 242 Corten, RockFormationTower 167,
and RockStone 91 stand like contemporary totems, channelling energy from
the maker's hands to the earth and back again. Their faceted forms read as
organic to the eye, yet the mind recognises their industrial making. There
exists a certain spirituality to these sculptures that seem simultaneously
ancient and otherworldly. Standing at eye level, they subtly shift the
relationship between observer and observed. Where we are accustomed to looking
upon the world, here, unexpectedly, the world looks back. As the viewer moves
around them, light animates the polished surfaces, transforming stillness into
motion. Neither entirely abstract nor figurative, they are a quiet reminder
that balance is not a fixed state, but a transformative, continuous act of
becoming. RockGrowth 115 carries this idea further into the absurd and
the wondrous. A mineral form, planted like a seed, appears to germinate, with
visible roots reaching downward. A reminder that growth is often hidden in
unseen structures we rarely think to look for. And yet, the work simultaneously
seems to explode outward in multiple directions, caught mid-formation. Suspended
in shiny steel, it is what Levy calls techno-poetic. Ultimately, these
structures speak of optimism and the capacity to imagine futures beyond what
now seems possible.
GlassBlockReflection
26 brings together a glass form with an
identical bronze counterpart, one transparent, one reflective. Only gradually
does it become apparent that one is looking at the same thing twice, just in
two different states, a reminder of our inner choices about what we reveal and
what we conceal. FacetPressure 52 begins from a similar premise of
transparency and concealment. Geometric planes meet within the translucent
marble and something unexpected surfaces—a delicate network of veins, akin to
the pathways the body makes for itself.
While
some of Levy’s forms accumulate within space, in Crater 84 Marble and Crater
42 Bronze Green, Levy emphasises the subtraction of space. What emerges
from this absence is its own kind of presence—an inner landscape of cells and
voids, a surface that oscillates between fullness and emptiness. Where the Rock
series holds the world in its reflections, the Crater works invite us to
look through them, past the polished surface into the world beyond.
The
ColorFacet and MultiColorFacet works introduce another dimension.
Born from the same fragmented geometry as the Rock series, these planar forms
bring colour into conversation with structure; each orientation of the work
alters its chromatic relationships. Fixed in form yet open in interpretation,
they offer balance as not only structural but sensory.
The
MicroRockFormations might perhaps be the most intimate of these. From
certain angles, they appear impossibly unstable, held by nothing but mutual
agreement; from others, they seem perfectly at ease. A contrast of material,
weight, and transparency, each becomes a quiet metaphor for the kind of
equilibrium we spend our lives negotiating: the delicate, unremarked act of
supporting and being supported.
Venturing
closer to these works, one notices how the reflections multiply and how new
textures quietly emerge. The shapes call to mind natural forms, yet are forged
from steel, bronze, and glass—a duality of materials that blurs the line
between art and industrial design, between manmade and nature-made. Within
these layers, the traces of an artist's internal conversation begin to surface:
between control and surrender, rigidity and flexibility, the engineered and the
felt. Together, these works perform less like a series and more like an
ecosystem breathing in unison; each piece in quiet conversation with the
others, each proposing a slightly different answer to the same underlying
question: What does it mean to hold things together in balance?
His
practice, he says, emerges from an intuitive flow of thoughts, emotions,
tensions, and anticipations—some controlled, some not—converging into forms
that he hopes might function as points of orientation, perhaps even as silent
guides for future survival. The spaces his sculptures seek to inhabit are not
only physical but also mental, emotional, social, and political. They place
themselves within the complex spaces we construct and are constructed by. In
this lies something of his essential proposition: rigidity may resist for a
moment, but it is flexibility and adaptability, the willingness to be remade,
that allows things to endure.
The
title system carries its own quiet logic: each work is named for its form,
accompanied by a number that indicates its size. It is as though the variations
are infinite, and Levy intends, eventually, to explore every one of them. The
sculpture is never finished; it is one instance of a question that he continues
to explore.
"Creation
is an uncontrollable muscle," says Levy, and everything here comes back to
that sensation. Maybe that is why these works never fully settle and why they
linger long after you have left the room. The balance they embody is not
something you possess, nor is it about precise measurements or the right mix of
emotions. It is one you are always, quietly, in the process of becoming. Levy
pours his instinct into these objects, and they, in turn, shape how you feel: a
quiet dance of internal balance.
Images
Installation
