M u t e d / Yair Levi

Exhibition of the Winner of the Mila Award for 2024

I was mute with silence; I held my peace even from good; And my sorrow was stirred up. (Psalms 39:3)

Muteness is the hidden subtext of this exhibition, which presents a wide-ranging series of vessels as well as a continuous wall work. Yair Levi presents physical and material vessels, but through them he seeks to speak the silence, to give voice to muteness.

Levi himself is a man who prefers to act without speaking, to create without words. His personality reflects the words of Rabbi Shimon, son of Rabbi Gamaliel: “All my days I grew up among the sages, and I have found nothing better for a person than silence. Study is not the most important thing, but actions are.” (Mishna, Avot, 1:17)

However, the centrality given to silence in this exhibition has another biographical context: the artist’s mother has difficulty expressing herself through the production of words. This disability called aphasia (=silence or muteness) manifests itself in impairment of language skills as a result of injury to the brain regions associated with speech. Levi, who often experiences his mother’s plight, seeks to express through the material an existential situation in which the words try to come out but are locked inside the body.

Movement between interior and exterior as an emotional expression has accompanied Levi’s ceramic work for a long time, as has a dialogue between formal and material contrasts. In this body of work, Levi tries to understand these contradictory aspects in depth and from a personal place, and they are strengthened and receive additional expressions.

The vessels themselves are made of stoneware, while the inner content is made of porcelain paper-clay sheets that have been thinned and refined. The elegant white porcelain was replaced by dramatic and expressive black porcelain. On the outside – a solid shell with a bubbly and wild glaze, and on the other hand – a crisp and fragile inner content with a clean and smooth finish. The trapped content wants to come out in a movement that affects the shape of the vessels, the spouts got tighter and tighter until they closed and sealed them.

Extensive technological knowledge and fascination with the coincidences of alchemy also accompany Levi from the beginning of his journey. Despite the orderly knowledge he has accumulated (documented as an inventory on the library shelves), there is room for freedom, playfulness and lack of control in working with the glazes, in contrast to the long and meticulous work process of creating the vessels. This aspect is well reflected in the continuous tile strip that surrounds part of the gallery walls.

This exhibition presents an artist with a distinct personal language who translates his emotional world into form and material. The recurring preoccupation with locked interiors trying to come to the surface and the formal contradictions that emerge from the vessels, parallel the elements of the artist’s own layered world. In his training as an accountant, Levi works in an organized and calculated space, but the free and creative part of his personality is fulfilled in material, texture and color, a place that allows him to break boundaries. Levi lives and creates in the religious village of Sde Ilan, combining art and faith, elements that he says stem from a similar source.

The different worlds that fill the essence of his life and his art intersect and nourish each other and become a complete, rich and multi-layered whole.

Anat Gatenio