Silvia Levenson

Silvia Levenson.
Per tutta la vita | Para toda la vida

(Manuela De Leonardis)

As long as we both shall live or until death do us part: a promise of reciprocal support, true love, understanding, sharing, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, day after day.
“Until death do us part” is aspiring to dream, the utopia of a moment that would be difficult to project in a boundless timeframe, because reality is extremely different from written words, from fables, from the most fervid fantasy. It rather means compromises and sometimes discord: anything but a straight line.

In over thirty years of work centred on the use of glass, an ambiguous material in itself as it is both fragile and dangerous, Silvia Levenson directs the observer’s attention to the B-side of stories, the less obvious one. It concerns matters that meddle with often sugar-coated and stereotyped visions (as such also unreal), specifically for their dissociation and distance from true life.

Until death do us part is the iconic work that incarnates this concept: a pink hand grenade on top of a wedding cake. All created with crystal fusion using the lost wax casting technique.

The colour pink is immediately associated to the female kind, but beyond the delicate tones in the artist’s work the poetic contribution implies an accusation. How much violence against women every year is based on their gender? Psychological violence, stalking, physical and sexual violence, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, but also maltreatment, abuse, harassment, discrimination, prejudice and intolerance perpetrated with the same brutality towards LBGT+ persons. The statistics are worrying: in 2023 alone 120 femicides were recorded in Italy, regardless of age, social class, geographical area, with half of the women killed by their partner (AGI data).

Silvia Levenson focuses our attention on all of this, laying bare human relationships and the emotional sphere with a research in which ethics is closely connected to aesthetics. The artist herself is an exile – born and raised in Argentina, but forced to leave her country in 1980 because of the military dictatorship – she has also witnessed that sometimes subliminal domestic violence, which is so common too in the rural environment of Argentina, suffered by the women in her family.
That sense of precariousness, displacement and inadequacy inevitably permeates all of her work. Childhood and adolescence are recurring themes too: the series of “strange little girls” (little girl deer, little girl wolf, little girl bear, little girl sheep) are hybridisations that can be traced back to the imaginative power of fables, reversing the symbolic value of the animal to translate an emotional state that also includes the fear, the force and the will to survive.