By selecting the title “italique” for her new exhibition, following the previous “cursif”, the artist continues to develop her alphabet in written and painted form. Typography becomes painting. “Italique” is also a cursive typeface, and consequently the painting is “slanted”. So the generously painted colour forms spreading out over rough canvases investigate the measurements of the picture planes, hurrying across them and along their borders. A picture is a picture is a picture. These panel paintings however are not “slanted” in the “crooked” sense (the German term “schräg” for slanted also means “odd”). Quite the contrary. Their impact is one of lucidity, transparency, Cartesian clarity. These pictures aspire to nothing more than to being there.
Stretched canvases, rough linen or white machine-grounded panels of fabric on wooden carriers that are visible as a background structure; a gestural paint application that might be from a bucket of paint or a spray can … and the painting is finished. As radical as Romanesque architecture. Renée Levi was born in Istanbul in 1960 and works in Basel, with a feeling of indebtedness to French “clarté”. She was once an architect. Unlike the trajectories of many other vitae, her career moved from space to pure plane. Her exhibition “italique” in Schoenthal Monastery spells installation history.