The Brooklyn Rail

In an article written early in his career, the composer Morton Feldman described the quietude and spaciousness typical of his music. “The decay of each sound,” he wrote, “this departing landscape, this expresses where sound exists in our hearing—leaving us rather than coming toward us.” Matvey Levenstein’s paintings depart in a similar manner. Distance is a primary characteristic of his art, but it is not the distance of irony or detachment. It is, rather, that of memory, of nostalgia, realized in painterly terms. Though the small scale of these works draws us closer, the surface and scene seem to dissolve rather than gain in definition as one approaches. The soft edges of mist shrouded trees and distant telephone poles blur with proximity, like the paint surface itself, which reveals little of the artist’s brushwork.

When standing in the center of Kasmin’s West 28th street space, the seven paintings featured in Zone surround one with moments of stillness and solitude. Only two figures appear in this body of work, and both seem unaware of their being observed: a seated person visible through the window in Home (2024), and a woman facing away from the viewer in the Hopper-esque Woman in an Interior (2024), with its flat, grid-like composition. While the painterly precedents for Levenstein’s art in Romanticism and the Rococo have been described in the Rail previously by Jason Rosenfeld, Levenstein engages as well with the filmic and photographic, borrowing qualities of both without presenting a precise analogue of either.

His exterior scenes are unusually frozen, arrested, as if captured from an ongoing passage of time, and suffused with emotion (though of an ambiguous, indistinct character). While they stop short of indicating a narrative, these qualities indicate the layers of observation, reflection, and representation within the painting: an accumulation of experience mediated into an image that seems to dissolve its fixity in time. By contrast, the sepia toned Home, like the flower still lives included in his last show at Kasmin, resembles photographs discolored with age, as does the blurriness of his imagery, which recalls the work of contemporary photographers such as Uta Barth.

Our familiarity with these pictorial modes draws us into Levenstein’s paintings. Though they may seem otherworldly, having been painted from memory and imagination, a sense of familiarity nevertheless persists. Levenstein’s art is rooted in memory—both the artist’s memory of the sites he depicts, and our memory, which is activated as a kind of nostalgia for places we have felt but not seen. The somatic quality of atmosphere in his paintings—air thick and heavy, rich with the fragrance of fallen rain, distant fog and the dimming light of day saturating the humid horizon like an enveloping substance—counterbalances the haunted, spectral manner in which they’re depicted. The coincidence of these two features accounts for the uncanniness of his art.

The blurry and lambent ambiance that characterizes these paintings serves as a visual analogue for the fleeting and fading quality of memory. In both the works on copper and those on wood, Levenstein achieves a muted luminosity and reflectivity that seems to capture light and hold it within or behind the ground. In Zone and Fog (both 2024), the dim glow of sunlight shrouded by cloud cover suffuses the scene but does not shine past the surface. Shorelines in the distance lose definition and merge into the encompassing tonality of the sky, and if you focus on the surface of the works on copper, you will find the scenery fading into its grainy texture—a departing landscape.

Late in his career, Morton Feldman pondered whether music could escape what he called its “music forms,”—centuries-old compositional structures like the sonata or the theme and variations—and rise to the level of an “art form.” What I find compelling in Levenstein’s work is his synthesis of painting with filmic and photographic modes of representation, and his transfiguration of traditional genres like still life and landscape into vehicles for the communication of intimacy, distance, and communal memory unburdened by culture.