Aubrey Levinthal. Cloud Cover

About

Aubrey Levinthal’s Cloud Cover evokes the weight of heavy atmospheres and weary minds alike. In her paintings, worlds and lives are blanketed, softened, weighed down and hushed. Bodies are wrapped in thick winter clothing; wintery streets cloaked in drifts of snow. Focusing on ordinary activities such as commuting, shopping, or eating at a restaurant with friends, Levinthal’s paintings maintain a delicate balance between melancholy and warmth, lonely introspection, and community. Speaking at once to the personal and the universal, they capture the precarity and flux of daily life. 

Within a single painting, Levinthal uses a variety of surface techniques, ranging from sensitive, exacting brush strokes to thin washes, to broad planes of flat pigment. Sometimes she’ll change her mind and scrape back a layer with a razor blade, revealing a ghostly under-image. Her palette murmurs with bruisy, post-industrial greys and warm mauves. Light and shadow shift between chalky luminosity and glimmering highlights. Working on wood panels rather than canvas, marks of texture are allowed to come through the paint, lending her images their lived-in, time-worn quality. 

Striking distortions of perspective add to the ambivalent moods and tensions of these works. A strong, flat surface might jut out suddenly from ethereal washes, while other spaces slant strangely into pockets of shadow. In ‘Headlights’, for example, intersecting planes of scuffed transparency, create an air of layered time, transit, and instability, while the pavement opposite seems to stand vertical, stubborn and constant. 

Levinthal’s sources are her own memories, photographs, and encounters. Her subjects are often women: mothers tending to their children, ladies gathered at a restaurant, a young woman with shiny hoop earrings. The facial expressions of these characters are both cryptic and direct, moods wavering between soft frowns of introspection, elusive half-smiles, and uneasy stares. Remaining ambiguous throughout, the faces invite us to unfurl a narrative: where are they going, what are they thinking? In ‘Yoga Practicers’ – the word ‘Practicers’ stands out as an unusual choice – we are of course familiar with the term ‘Yoga Practice’, but to call people Practicers highlights a sense of the incomplete and imperfect, an attempt to develop and improve. As such, this small detail encompasses a broad theme throughout Levinthal’s work: the humble repetitions and cyclical challenges of everyday life. 

Though these quiet, intimate scenes have gained Levinthal comparisons to the likes of Bonnard, Vuillard, Matisse and Milton Avery, her paintings are firmly rooted in the contemporary. The flat form of an iPhone lying close at hand on a table becomes an astute symbol of the hyperconnectivity and social fragmentation that defines our present moment. Not only are our phones a connection to the world, they can isolate us from it too, distracting us from the immediate with reminders of work or unfinished tasks. Levinthal’s paintings capture this duality, as figures move from place to place, caring for one another or travelling alone, deep in thought or returning a smile. Life, like weather, is always in flux between moments of chilly isolation and warm, tender connection.