Vanity of vanities!
March 1, 2022
Andrew Leventis’ still-life paintings are a modern take on a traditional genre.
by Grace Cote
In art history, a vanitas painting is a still life whose symbols remind you of the transience of life. The paintings depict items like a vase of flowers past their peak, a toppled glass, a snuffed candle and, oftentimes, a skull. They also contain symbols of “vain” earthly pleasures: musical instruments, wine and sweets, manuscripts, coins and silver. “They’re about holding on to the things that matter to you in the world,” says Andrew Leventis, oil painter and longtime student of the genre.
The term originally comes from a passage in the Bible from the book of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”The popularity of vanitas paintings soared in northern Europe during outbreaks of the Black Death in the 17th century.
Stuck at home during a different pandemic, Leventis began his own vanitas series, looking no further than his own kitchen, with its fully stocked, bursting-at-the-seams refrigerator. Through investigating our pandemic-induced panic buying, he sought to “reimagine these vanitas paintings in a modern context.”
“I think of every painting I make as both a still life and a portrait,” Leventis says. Through his paintings, he asks: What do these things say about a person? And in the refrigerator paintings, he gets more specific: What do those food labels, that organization, that drawer, say about the people who own that fridge?
The result was the diptych Home Refrigerator (Vanitas), two paintings stacked to portray his freezer box and the refrigerator below it. The work is artificially bright and full of familiar brands like Thomas’ English muffins, Wonder bread, and Tyson chicken. These crisp, tantalizing labels are juxtaposed with mundane elements like a well-worn plastic tub with a peeling label and shelves bowing under the pressure of their contents. He captures the feeling of opening the refrigerator late at night, maybe out of hunger, maybe out of boredom, and being blasted by our nation’s best marketing efforts.
If this experience sounds relatable to you, you’re not alone. The work has appealed to many, given its exhibition record in the United Kingdom, Los Angeles, South Korea and Venice over the last 18 months.
After these first paintings, Leventis sought refrigerator images from friends, but ultimately it didn’t work. “It’s difficult to paint from images that aren’t a bit posed with directional lighting and enough visual information to go by,” Leventis says. So, he started working with Chicago-based photographer Sarah Derer, who styled and took photographs of commercial refrigerators. His vanitas series now contains both “pandemic” fridges and the beautifully styled variety.
Looking at his whole body of work, it’s easy to understand the appeal in collaborating with a food stylist. The well-lit, staged vignette is a bold thread running through all his paintings. His Film Stills paintings are re-creations of paused movies and television shows. Each scene looks familiar but not quite placeable. He is careful not to reveal specific connections but hinted at the Italian supernatural film Suspiria (1977) and the thriller Don’t Look Now (1973) as well as documentary series.
Another body of work also depicts scenes where staging and lighting are key: preserved house museums. Several are from the Dennis Severs’ House in London, whose owner painstakingly re-created what the home would look like if owned by a fictitious family of Huguenot silk weavers. Highly specific, this unusual jewel-box home project begun in the 1970s was perfectly suited to Leventis’ oil paintings.
Leventis, a Charlotte native, credits The Mint Museum with showing him a window into what painting could be. During a spring 2000 show titled The Defining Moment: Victorian Narrative Paintings from the Forbes Magazine Collection, he was awed by the highly detailed oil works on view. “This show caused me to fall in love with painting,” he says. Seeing this work drove his decision to go to art school. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the American Academy of Art in Chicago and a Master of Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. He now works as an assistant professor of painting at UNC Charlotte.
Leventis has come full circle, with a current exhibition at Mint Museum Uptown through its Constellation CLT series. The series fills the museum’s corridors and walkways with artwork made in and around Charlotte. His paintings will be on view through May 8.
He also has upcoming exhibitions with Hidell Brooks Gallery in Charlotte and The Whitaker Museum in the U.K. This fall, he will help bring the exhibition Nature Morte: Contemporary Artists Reinvigorate the Still Life Tradition to the Rowe Galleries at UNC Charlotte. The traveling group exhibition originated in Europe, and Leventis will incorporate local artists’ works into the show. In the meantime, Leventis plans to continue his refrigerator series, painting both “pandemic overstocked types” and the well-styled. SP
Featured image: Decanter with Aperol, Oil on Linen, 2020, 30×48″
