BOSTON, MASS.- The Beatles are Dull and Ordinary is a ten-year journey through the expressive and vibrant large-scale colored pencil drawings of New York-based artist David X. Levine. Levine’s drawings are spiritually subtle: slow to build, emerging through the lenses of pop culture and postmodernism. Stirring the mind, they thrive with shape, composition, and above all, vivid color.

Beginning as a poet in the 1980s, by 1990 Levine morphed into a visual artist. With his poetry informing his visual art with subtlety, sensitivity and lyricism. Often taking his practice to physical extremes, Levine’s vivid, labor-intensive colored pencil drawings range in scale from the intimate to the monumental (10” to 10’). Incorporating abstract forms and patterns as well as collage relating to popular and high culture, Levine creates an illusory formal vocabulary that inhabits lushly optical spaces, generating rich associations that reach out beyond their compositional spaces. Levine’s drawings are very slow: slow to vision and thought, but they intensify with repeated viewing. All of the work has some kind of humor mixed in with its profound seriousness. The paradox of the slow but very exciting simultaneity is funny; the way life can seem mostly funny and deter complete understanding. Levine’s unfailingly optimistic drawings seem to have as their aim profound joy.

“Most [artists] treat music as little more than a reassuring background pulse, a comforting presence in an otherwise lonely studio. But for David X. Levine, it has often been a driving force, informing not only the subject matter of his work but also the process of its making” said Michael Wilson, writer and critic for New American Paintings, in his review Hip to be Square: The Work of David X. Levine. “Levine’s large-scale drawings in colored pencil and graphite — to which he sometimes adds elements of collage — are derived from a rhythmic, repetitive application of their materials that suggests the blending of a million beats into a visual Wall of Sound. Levine has paid tribute to rock, pop, and jazz musicians in many of his work’s titles, alluding to greats from Miles Davis to Amy Winehouse.”

The Beatles are Dull and Ordinary: Drawings by David X. Levine is curated by Rebekah Pierson. “When David and I first met on the street in Harvard Square back in 1997, I felt a strange sort of déjà vu, as if I’d always known him,” says Rebekah Pierson, curator. I’ve continued to have never not known him ever since. Over the last 17 years I’ve watched his work evolve by what feels like an infinite amount. He lives inside his art, mingling and trading and speaking with different shapes, white space, and countless influences. What’s emerged is visual poetry, musical and strictly ordered — an electric, inviting “space” that brings great joy. Viewing his work, we feel the buzz of knowing we’ve found something special, and the contented feeling that we've met someone we’ve known all along.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue with an essay by Carl Belz, director emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.

David X. Levine was born in Boston, MA in 1962, and has been living in New York City since 1998. Levine’s work has been the focus of more than a dozen solo exhibitions, including shows at Tony Wight Gallery in Chicago, Dust Gallery in Las Vegas, Eight Modern in Santa Fe, and Steven Zevitas Gallery here in Boston. Group Exhibitions include shows at Spencer Brownstone in New York City, and both Honor Fraser and Cherry Martin in Los Angeles.