Choice Chance Change

Anita Levering is interested in the elimination of artistic agency in favour of a self organising ideographic language, going beyond the personal gestural act and expression. Experimental exercises reveal paradoxes and tensions between the structured and the organised, form and disorder. When applying paint Levering minimises gesture and brush marks to avoid subjective intentions. The medium itself and chance elements determine the outcome in the creative process; the work becomes open to randomness and dissipation, but at the same time allows for the creation of a universal symbolic and ideographic grammar in painting itself. These semi self-generated paintings create a presence that breaks through the two-dimensional picture plane with a illusion of a shallow virtual space referring to imaginary landscapes.

The introduction of fate in the process, is the realisation of a desire for detachment, a distancing of the self that allows focus on natural transitional processes, rather than the artist’s own propulsive force to generate form. The artworks reveal the impact of processes of transition generated by forces of Nature and bring about notions of time, motion, momentum, quantity and environmental circumstances such as the weather. Through unpredictable metamorphoses of the painted surface Levering is navigating the territory of intentional and unintended outcomes and the role of limited authorial control. The works become the site of traces of an experience, displaying evidence of past autonomous material events. These paintings do not ‘represent’ something but present the thing itself: a document of dialogue with uncontrolled external forces, drawing out new connections in the viewer’s experience.