DAVID LÉVY

Specialized in modern and postwar art, David Lévy & Associés is a fine art dealership located in Paris and Brussels. With an experience of 30 years dedicated to XX-century European avant-garde, from symbolism and surrealism to post-war abstraction, the gallery has contributed to major museum acquisitions and participates regularly in public exhibitions with loans of work from private collections.

Internationally recognised for the quality of the works it presents and its curatorial choices, the gallery has been selected to take part in a number of major art fairs: Salon du Dessin, Paris; BRAFA, Brussels; Frieze Masters, London; Fine Arts La Biennale, Paris; The Salon Art+Design, New York and TEFAF, Maastricht.

The gallery is delighted to participate for the first time at FAB PARIS with an exhibition dedicated to two key figures of the post-war Parisian art scene, Maurice Estève and Baltasar Lobo.

Estève composed his paintings according to his inspiration, following a long creative evolution that could take several years. « Processus où la spontanéité et la réflexion se relayent, où les séances de travail, relativement courtes alternent avec de longues périodes de méditation ou d’oubli et qui vise à préparer ce qu’Estève appelle joliment “le lit de la peinture” » (”A process that goes back and forth between spontaneity and reflection, in which relatively short periods of work alternate with long periods of meditation that prepare ‘the bed of the painting,’ as Estève nicely put it.”) (Quoted in Catalogue raisonné, op. cit., p. 25.) He spoke of a conversation carried on with a work.

In Montavent, the artist orchestrated a new dialogue between forms and colors, creating a subtle balance both in the layerings of color on the surface of the work and in the curves bathed in diaphanous light.

Estève liked dissonance. He knew how to unite the greatest mastery with true spontaneity, how to oppose the fluidity of curves with the rigidity of straight lines. His confrontations among formal elements found their resolution in an alchemy of style of which Montavent is the perfect example.

« En vérité une toile est pour moi une somme de reprises incessantes qui dure jusqu’à ce que je me trouve devant un organisme que je sens vivant. Seule ma sensibilité peut me dire si j’ai atteint ou non cette reconnaissance. »
(“In truth, for me, a painting is the result of a series of incessant revisions that continues until I find myself before an organism that I sense is alive. Only my sensitivity can tell me whether or not I’ve achieved this.”)
Maurice Estève