Benjamin Levy: Keeping Up With The Corbies

About

In a series of ten new paintings, Levy offers an incisive examination of class and image-making in Britain today. Interested in the relentless carousel of digital images on screens and its impact on working-class material aspirations and sense of self, Levy’s subject is the society of spectacle in which we all now live. Principally composed in a series of large-format diptychs, Levy pairs hues of shared colour, weighted gestures, or arcing contours to examine our habits of looking–not only at the objects we desire and which we feel we need to overcome our status anxieties, but how we look at the people we love. Levy gets hold of the algorithms and advert-driven content of social media in the way that James Rosenquist took the mid-century billboard, blurring the distinctions between high art and the ‘new media’ of proliferating visual representations in the consumer society of his own time. But beyond his forensic attention to glossy performance, what is most enthralling about Levy’s realist pictures is his staging of intimacy and loneliness, camaraderie and isolation, in which we must all ask what price we pay for our obsession with luxury and the fetishisation of objects.