Untitled, 15.1.95 1995

Tom Levine made this ‘Untitled, 15.1.95’ sometime in the nineties, and looking at it, I can almost feel him feeling his way through the image with charcoal or graphite, groping to find the forms he wants to depict. There's a sense of provisionality in the marks he makes, the colour palette is limited to greys and blacks, which makes the surface feel almost like a relief. Each block contains a glyph of some kind, a symbol, an idea, a feeling. My eye keeps getting drawn to the mark in the upper right, it almost looks like a diamond, but not quite. Maybe it’s a fragment of something, something broken. You get the sense that he’s trying to pin something down, but its always moving, shifting. Reminds me a little bit of Brice Marden’s early grid paintings, except here, things are a bit more unstable, more like a feeling than an object. That’s the wonderful thing about art. It’s not about answers, it’s about posing questions.