After two very fine exhibitions with Openspace Gallery in 2016 and 2019 ("Everyday Life Circus", then "Ellipses"), we are pleased to welcome Levalet for a new exhibition full of promise and novelty. Indeed, it is in a very particular context - the sanitary one of the year 2020 and its first strict confinement - that Levalet has taken a step back to move towards new technical explorations. "Concrete Jungle" thus presents 25 unpublished works accompanied by 15 drawings.

Today, many of us share the same global awareness of our way of living in the world and of living together. Urbanization has shown its limits, in this absurd opposition of the solitude of the confined man, facing the density of the urban population. In the same way, we seek to reintroduce nature into our lives, but the concrete is always increasing... This is illustrated by the oxymoronic title of the exhibition, Concrete Jungle, chosen by Levalet. It is indeed this permanent search for balance that is in question here.

To answer this question, Levalet wanted to get out of his comfort zone through new technical experiments in dialogue with his usual semantic research. While Levalet comes from theater and video, he has rediscovered painting, a medium he had never fully explored. Paradoxically attracted by its academic character, he took pleasure in serving the subject. He went even further technically by sometimes adding another medium: concrete. It is then in hollow or in volume that this symbolic material par excellence of the urban is revealed, thus coming to enlighten this reflection around the human seeking its place between city and nature. Not only is Levalet not lacking in ideas or creativity, but under the guise of humor, he forces us to face certain disturbing social realities and to question ourselves.