Providence Phoenix

May 22 - 29, 1997

[Art Reviews]

Life's rich pageant

Riva Leviten's restless imagination

by Bill Rodriguez
At the Rhode Island Foundation, 70 Elm St., Providence, through June 25.
Selecting only 27 works for "Riva Leviten: A Retrospective Spanning Four Decades" must have been tough. The prolific Leviten has such a diverse body of work that you could be excused, walking around the show at the Rhode Island Foundation offices, for thinking that several artists have been busy.
In a way, they have been. A restless imagination has put a variety of approaches on display, as though she has made numerous decisions along the way about what she wanted to strive for as an artist. The selections are almost all works on paper, but they vary in medium from lithograph to collage, and in style from painterly swaths as though across a canvas, to energetic explosions of shapes to orderly, geometric forms and calm, minimalist compositions.
One of the most captivating is "William Tell a Legend In the Garden," a drawing over a black and white silk-screen. Undated, it was begun 20 years ago and only recently completed. Filling the frame is an energetic mass of small curls of ink and glossy graphite, which the title makes fall into focus as flowers. Patches of white glaze here and there on top provide depth.
The only oil painting also uses natural growth as a starting point for burgeoning imagery. "Still Life" (1963) is anything but still. Yellow flowers in a glass vase are as violent as the rest of the painting, boiling up toward us. There's a wonderful unity of effect since the palette is mostly limited to greens and blues and both the flowers and their background are equally turbulent.
There is similar energy in another strong piece, "Table for Three" (1969). Like a child's crayon scribble, dark oil pastels have been scrubbed over a quiet pink background. A small yellow paper rectangle is affixed prominently, further softening the contrast. A hole torn into the collage reveals fragments of words beneath, as though explicit meaning were just below.
Perhaps the most extreme contrast with this sort of Expressionistic approach is the collage "Mauve Dream" (1994). Serene, minimalistic, it presents a purple form behind what looks like a light violet splash coming off a black hill-like shape in the left foreground. Closer examination reveals the lighter color to be where the surface has been removed from the textured purple paper, which has been fit into what looks to be a corner torn from a black paper envelope.
A similar success in that tranquil vein is "Balance III" (1992). Balance is achieved among five small shapes: two vertical white strips, two curvilinear forms and a small blue dot toward the top. It's a much simpler accomplishment, and smaller in format, than a similar arrangement of geometrical shapes done years earlier in another monotype, "Nautical" (1979). Dominating it is a dark blue rectangle, set on a diagonal,. Against it is a sail-shaped triangle creating a white negative space where a ragged-edged piece of cloth had been placed, a stray thread hanging loose, when the blue paint was applied.
Leviten is known for her collages, many of which appropriate available images from photographs and magazines. There are many here, some containing private significances and juxtapositions, but most displaying a density of evocative imagery that makes the artist's personal vision incidental. "Reverse Is the World" (1994), for example, contains an upside-down photograph of a skyscraper, which provides an interesting texture, like a terraced hillside, even if we don't notice that it is a building.
Leviten may not have maintained the kind of orderly progression of style and mediums required of commercial and academic artists. Instead, this retrospective shows, she has accomplished something far more difficult: creating a body of work that has kept reinventing itself as it's raced to keep up with a flourishing imagination.