Idith Levy’s artwork enchants and mystifies in equal measure. In some ways her wall works can be seen quite traditionally as residing in the worlds of collage consisting of found imagery and materials, where buttons and photographs co-habitate in a field of innocent disquiet in Untouchable 3, for instance. Here, stichery implies the suturing together of imagistic space rented by unseen but felt forces. The child – like marks and forms increase the layers of mystery and play, which are the touchstones of her vision. Yet there is something quite untraditional that lurks in these works as well.

There is a sense of heightened significance, of dramatic tension, which courses through this work in the guise of latent, insouciant dread. These images, overall, while appearing at first to be of humble origin are propelled by a look, which recalls distracted doodles or automatism. Yet this imagery begins to be seen as visual explorations, which lay, bare the needs and desires of the artist to communicate a sense of emergent anxiety in the most efficient manner as possible.

Her Untouchable series, images that incorporate pencil marks, have a febrile virtuosity to them. The marks in these works mesh with found objects in the form of old buttons and the use of threads, which serve as demarcation points, ruptures or gaps within her pictorial arenas. At times Levy’s thread components invoke the suturing of time and space, the knitting together of a universe which threatens to collapse and implode, bursting at its seams. The artist collages buttons in a way, which heightens the overall feel of the works, parlaying a tension, which is aroused through the artist’s sensitized evocation of vulnerability and tenderness.

The impact of her scenes (the narratives range from the wispy and seemingly inconsequential such as in Untouchable 1 where a buttoned torso floats in the air, gathered away by the insistent pull of a loop of pencil – lead line which suggests the buoyancy of a child’s balloon to the more enigmatic and disassociated imagery in Untouchable 3 which seems more discontinuous in terms of a congruent story line than her other works). In Untouchable 4 the buttons collaged at the top register of the work create a discomforting feel of compression and turbulence, energetic proclivities that seem to hover over the small pencil-drawn image of a tricycle grounded at the lower register of the work which is led by the image of a balloon. The deliberate tentative awkwardness of a work such as Untouchable 5 in which two human forms seem to occupy and infinite field of Bucketing blankness in the center of the work, in which one figure dominates over the other in a gingerly way while to the right of the work the suggestion of a vital plant form takes precedence over the equivocally of the presence of the humans. What is striking in these works is the artist’s consummate control of her tremulous lines and the seemingly heightened significance of what one might assume are fetshized surfaces of perlescent buttons and the repeated invocation of a feverish repetition which is heralded at first and then abruptly brought down to size.

In his discussion on the comic the French philosopher Henri Bergson makes the essential point that it is put into play when a level of incongruousness and a certain amount of inherent vitality is brought to our attention in unanticipated ways often by pitting opposites together, such as mechanistic artifice (and stringent inevitability of one kind) against natural and/or biologic (inescapability of fluid chance). He writes : “ … As we are both in and of it, we cannot help treating [society] as a living being. Any image…suggestive of the notion of a society disguising itself…will be laughable. Now such a notion is formed when we perceive anything inert or stereotyped, or simply readymade, on the surface of living society. There we have rigidity over again, clashing with the inner suppleness of life. ”Henri Bergson, Laughter (Los Angeles: Green Integer) 45. This passage expresses in some fair measure the quotient of vitality that courses through Levy’s work that deals lightly yet effectively with unbearable feelings, perhaps, of loss, separation and loneliness. Within this balance of tensions Idith Levy constructs intimate scenes in which we perceive mindfulness (with its emphasis on non-closure) investigating the relationship between the individual and the universe.

Dominique Nahas is a writer and curator based in Manhattan.