Césan d'Ornellas Levine

SHORT STATEMENT

Césan d'Ornellas Levine is a visual artist based in Richmond Hill Ontario Canada. Her project is inspired by the marriage between art and spirit, portrayed through large, bold, semi-abstract acrylic paintings.

Césan works with phosphenic forms and icons that appear persistently and with narrative significance across many traditions; trees of knowledge and life, leaves, apples, suns, moons, stars, cairns, ladders, bowls, spirals, wheels, boats, faces, hearts, hands and feet, mandalas, meditators, mothers, babies, lines of radiance, recapitulated triplets, growth forces, earth. These trans-theistic forms are chosen for their deep unconscious familiarity.

ABOUT CÉSAN

Césan's program involves re-imagining the function of spiritual iconography in modern art.

It takes a certain amount of temerity to broach this chasm at all. Many would call such an attempt foolish by definition; the very project of modern art is, after all, about a wholesale cleansing of the quaintnesses of old, religion and spirituality chief among them. And so - with many notable exceptions - in fulfilling its function to reflect life, the modern fine art world has been rigorously denuded of explicit spirituality. The few instances of spirituality or religion in modern art we do see tend to be references of irony, or rages against religion's abuses.

Most of what hangs in institutional galleries, is taught in art school and written up in art magazines reflects the pull, vicissitudes, detritus and anomie of our materialism. It is cool in both senses of the word and is routinely caricatured as nihilistic. The twin imperatives to be both original at all costs and to be intellectually defensible tend to trump the impulse towards a convincing portrayal of transcendental beauty and love, the heart centered boldly appealing juiciness we see so clearly in Césan's work.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2007 Light, Art Square Gallery, Toronto
2006 Window of Opportunity, Petroff Gallery, Toronto
2006 Fruit from the Tree of Life, The Toronto Waldorf School, Toronto
2006 Recent Work, Hugh's Room, Toronto.
2006 Judaica, The Kolel Centre, Toronto
2005 New Paintings, Lanes Gallery, Hazelton Lanes, Toronto
2005 Ladders, The Toronto Waldorf School, Toronto
2004 Free Times Café, Toronto
2004 Forest Hill Spa, Toronto
1993 Sutton Public Library, Sutton, Ontario
1993 Ardeleana Concert Series, Toronto
1991 Innana Gallery, Jackson’s Point, Ontario
1991 Ardeleana Concert Series, Sharon, Ontario

Selected Group Exhibitions

2006 Petroff Gallery, Toronto
2006 Art Avenue, Toronto
2006 Minerva Gallery, London
2005 Toronto Art Expo,Toronto
2005 Petroff Gallery, Toronto
2005 Barootes, Toronto
2004 Toronto Art Expo,Torontov 2001 Toronto Waldorf School, Toronto
2000 Toronto Waldorf School, Toronto
1998 Toronto Waldorf School, Toronto
1994 Koffler Gallery, Toronto
1992 Red Barn Theatre, Jackson’s Point, Ontario
1990 Innana Gallery, Jackson’s Point, Ontario

Corporate Collections

2006 Regulus Investments, Toronto

Special Projects

1991 Art work featured in CBC Film, “The Art of Being”, shown at Cannes Film Festival

Performance Painting 2005 Kirtan Pilgrimage with Wade Morissette, Toronto
2004 Sivananda, Paradise Island, Bahamas
2003 Nia, International Conference, Toronto