Artist Makes The Mythology

Ralph Levesque’s Match Maker, at first glance, looks like religious art, from the halo encircling one of the figures to the positions of the figures in relation to each other. We’ve seen the general idea before, in Christian medieval art. But the first glance proves deceiving, an overt meaning elusive. Who or what is the visage in the background? And why the faces on sticks? Are they mirrors? Portals? The title suggests that a transaction of some kind is taking place. But what? We don’t know what’s going on, but the sense of meaning, a belief system being enacted, remains.

Match Maker is part of ​“Untold Tales,” a show of Levesque’s paintings curated by Johnes Ruta and up now at Mitchell Public Library, 37 Harrison St., through Sept. 30, with a reception for the artist at the library on Aug. 24. 

“I am a romantic visual poet, aware that all designs and symbols are inspired by the Natural. Therefore, I am not concerned with producing copied images. I seek to find beauty within the concrete, behind the material level,” Levesque writes in an accompanying statement. 

“Instinctively and unconsciously, I seek the essence of ​‘Universal Beauty,’ the intrinsic force of all. The reality of matter is always moving, changing, evolving and becoming anew.” To go on his artistic quest, ​“I work basically with acrylics and mixed media — sometimes incorporating collage elements — some recycled from earlier works or from scraps left over from experiments with various materials and methods of painting. I use airbrush as well as paint brushes and knives, and other instruments.” Levesque remarks that ​“at times faces appear visibly in my works and sometimes appear hidden. A viewer should stop — look — and ​‘read’ over these pieces.”

The general feeling of Match Maker appears across Levesque’s painting, suggesting a sense of a system of meaning without spelling out what it is. Some of the paintings allude to Greek mythology; the goddess of the harvest, known as Ceres or Demeter, as well as Pandora, who opened the proverbial box, make appearances. But the paintings don’t ask to be read as depictions of specific myths, nor is much gained by attempting to read them as allegories. The symbolism isn’t consistent in that way, and isn’t trying to be. 

Over the course of a couple dozen paintings, however, what does emerge is the strong sense of a personal mythology, a set of beliefs that pulls from a few different traditions without being beholden to any of them. They mostly find the artist making his own path, as both an artist and as a human. To the extent that Levesque gives us insight into what those beliefs are about, they’re not trying to make sense of the world, or extract a moral code from it, so much as find the beauty in it. The implication is that perhaps that’s enough. We don’t have to understand; maybe understanding is, in the end, impossible. We can just see it.

“The Artwork of Ralph Levesque” runs in the gallery at Mitchell Public Library, 37 Harrison St., through Sept. 30, with a reception for the artist at the library on Aug. 24 from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. The gallery is open during library hours.