Daniel Levi graduated with honours in painting from Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT in Cape Town.

He was raised in Johannesburg in a liberal home by parents who exposed him to politics, psychology, philosophy and the arts from an early age.

Levi has a background in creative design and his experience of the visual arts, multi-media and post-production supported his transition into directing. He currently lives and works in Cape Town.

For Levi, painting is about finding essences. Human forms, faces, vessels of identity – his subjects – are the carriers of paint. Representing a human being is nebulous territory – the face is like a blurry landscape; appearing, disappearing, reappearing in the process of mark making.

The works portray human energy, as Levi sees it, in painted form. Human subjects are melded with paint (texture, colour, shape) and through that union become symbolic and expressive.

Abstraction and human form synthesise into a new anarchic form, which shimmers on both a conscious and unconscious level, where surface values and aesthetics present a deeper world of the psyche.

The nucleus of painting is abstract, paint being the primary bearer of the emotional message, like tone is to music. Through a combination of intention and spontaneity, vibrancy emerges; the intangible, transcendent potential energy of paint.

See more of his work here.

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