The Bronze’s  Hymn

 

A man folded over the effort tries to raise stones towards the sky to erect a column. The second column faces him, finished, decorated, sprung forth in front of an Orient sky with perfect dyes. The heavy bronze doors open and let appear the Song of Songs in the purity of its text, in the shining and intimate dialogues between the lover and the fiancée, between God and the People of Israel, between ground Jerusalem and heavenly Jerusalem. The words burst on the beauty, the carnal love, the mouth of the mistress, the fragrant oil spread over her body and her appeal to her lover to join.

Engraved in the bronze, the three millennia text of King Solomon always remains new in its extreme ecstasy, sung by two people with perfect forms.

Woman to the right, man to the left, in full strength of their desire. By approaching, we notice that these powerful characters, who seem to overflow their bronze frame, are completely sculptured in hollow.

The full breast of the woman is in hollow; other hollows forms the muscle structure of the man, their heads, their mouths, their eyes. Miracle of the sculpture, miracle of the optical illusion, which allows us to see volumes where the sculptor plays with the light to offer an ultimate dream.

 All this is only underlining the immateriality and the timelessness of the Hymn. This work is the crowning of twelve years of creative artwork, always renewed, always in progress, from Michael LEVY works....

 

Léon ABRAMOWICZ
L'Arche magazine (french),    October 1992

 

I would like to remind here " People " and " The Alliance " which had already stirred up my enthusiasm. The sculptor also expresses his preferred subject of the duality: the sky and the earth, water and fire, life and death, notably in the Ezekiel’s prophecy...

Another subject that Michael LEVY likes are dwarfs' faces who symbolize mankind. Dwarfs dash to the sky perched on stilts or climbing up on an architect's compass.  It is the ambition of the builders who erect their skyscrapers upright towards the firmament, as in ancient times with the Babel tower, to reach God, is not it?  And when the artist or the architect takes himself for God, a small second of reflection on the brevity of his passage in the eternity, on his smallness regarding to the boundless space of the galaxies, really allows us to see mankind as a dwarf in the universe.

There is also there a Menorah, candlestick with seven branches, decorated with a big Star of David, attached by ropes and bronze threads. The lamp evokes a painful history, that one of our people, attached to its roots, which these two symbols embody from immemorial  times. Finally, the serenity returns to us, with the magnificent feminine forms who symbolize the seasons, the countries, Europe. How shall I forget the emotion I had felt visiting eleven years ago for the very first time Michael LEVY's workshop?  At that time I had predicted that this young and unknown artist was quickly going to become a celebrity. The time gave reason to Michael LEVY, to his incomparable artwork, the achievements of which he allowed us to see here.