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Yona Levy-Grosman looks out over the view and sees eternity.
From her desert home, she sees the universe as a whole.
Since 1977, she has been surrounded by desert views: in the early years these were the sands of Sinai, and after these were returned to Egypt as part of the peace agreements, the view changed to landscapes of the northern Negev desert that she sees out the windows of her home in the village of Ein-Habsor.
Levy-Grosman paints in oils on canvas, adding layer upon layer slowly one on another, working thoroughly and painstakingly. On first glance, viewers identify desert landscapes spread before them; however this is only appearance, or if you will, disappearance – a look into infinity.
Her paintings frequently look to be images of the desert landscapes that have surrounded her for most of her life; sand dunes, channels of streams, traces of peoples and cultures that have been buried under the sands of time.
However, these paintings are illusions, deceiving the eye; the shards are the product of the artist herself. It is she who kneaded the clay, burnt it in the kiln and then formed or shattered it to suit her design. The flowing lines of the sands are in actuality copies of radio waves or the tracings made by various electronic laboratory equipment. In this manner, she creates impressions of a place out of the "non-place".
Levy-Grosman is interested in Chaos theories, which she tries to represent in her works: contrasts of light and dark, breaking out of frameworks and straight lines, a minor element that overruns the painting, the seen and the unseen. She examines how we develop and destroy at one and the same time.
Each picture is always just a portion of a larger story. When one approaches and examines the details, another picture is revealed. Thus, once we have observed the work from a distance and achieved a different perspective on it – the new information we have gathered all fits into a broader context.
In order to make things easier on ourselves, we tend to put things into set contexts, definitions, to label them, to order them into straight lines to give ourselves a clearer picture. However, there is a price to pay for this – a lack of flexibility, losing sight of the whole, inclusive, greater picture. By breaking out of this framework, Yona Levy-Grosman attempts to unsettle her viewers and draw their attention also to those things that are generally hidden from the eye.
Most of Levy-Grosman's works are unnamed. According to her, names are limiting. Her paintings are created out of the meeting of many different concepts with which she deals, and are not given only to a single interpretation. These landscape paintings are of imagined landscapes, created out of the chaos, and out of the quiet, that is so often the calm before the storm.
And so, from her home in the desert, Yona Levy-Grosman investigates the universe, and out of her efforts to find her own place, creates new worlds for us to explore.
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