Henri Alexander Levy: The “Outsider Artist”
By Syed Hasnain Nawab
Blurb: In Seoul, the artist and founder of the fashion brand Enfants Riches Déprimés turns black paintings, discarded photographs, religious imagery and fragments of private history into an uneasy meditation on memory, addiction, childhood and artistic freedom
There is something almost deliberately difficult about Henri Alexander Levy's paintings. The surfaces are dark, dense and intermittently interrupted by fragments that seem to have already lived several lives before arriving on the canvas: antique fabrics, photographs, reclaimed wood, metals and religious imagery whose original meanings have become unstable. Nothing appears entirely settled. But that is precisely the point. Even when the image seems to offer a point of recognition, Levy has a way of pulling it back into obscurity.
This is fitting for an artist whose latest exhibition is cryptically and confrontationally titled “Final Achievement is Ruin.” On display from September 2-October 17, 2026 at Seoul’s sleekly-designed Shinsegae Gallery, the exhibition brings together Levy's paintings, sculptures and collected fragments in an environment concerned more with psychological accumulation rather than resolution.
Levy, who was born in the United States in 1991, is perhaps best known outside the contemporary art world as the founder of Enfants Riches Déprimés, the deliberately abrasive fashion house whose name has become synonymous with a particular strain of cultivated decadence. But the relationship between his fashion and his art is more complicated than a neat division between two parallel careers. For Levy, they emerge from the same instinct.
As he reveals during a conversation with Gen De Art, “With fashion, I know there's a certain feeling that's very unique to me when I make something. It has a certain intrinsic edge that I think my paintings, drawings and assemblage also have.” That edge is difficult to define because it has something to do with deterioration, something to do with beauty and something to do with the refusal to make either one comfortable.
His works at Shinsegae Gallery are housed in three rooms, with the first two containing his latest creations, while the last one is home to Levy’s earlier works. It is almost as if the viewer is invited to move in reverse in an attempt to unpeel the artistic philosophy and evolution underpinning Levy’s artistic trajectory.
The first thing one notices upon entering Levy’s Seoul exhibition is its palette. Levy has spent the last several years working predominantly in black but, as he rightly puts it, “There's a lot of different colours within the black.” Grey, white and now even brown in newer works such as Untitled (Brown Painting), introduce an earthier register into a practice that has often seemed almost funereal. In the context of Levy's assemblages, it makes the paintings feel even more physical, as though the black surfaces serve as a collection of temperatures and textures where paint is scraped, layered, dulled and allowed to retain evidence of its application.
When asked whether the ‘ruin’ referenced in the title represents the failure of an artist or system, or perhaps its most complete state, Levy answers without hesitation: “For me, the system that the artist lives within is the failure. I think that current society, what art is promoted and what ideals are promoted, have created a system in which real art can rarely thrive.”
Perhaps this is why Levy opting to display “Final Achievement is Ruin” in Seoul is of critical importance. “Asian culture,” Levy argues, “can look at artworks in a more honest way, without the politics of the Western art world.”
It is a provocative claim, and Levy's language is intentionally combative throughout the interview. Yet, there is an inherent gentleness, almost innocence, to his demeanour. He refers to himself an “outsider artist” and argues that the contemporary art world has become too dependent on institutional and political frameworks. Because of the success of his fashion business, Levy says he has been able to avoid depending on a corporate system to sustain his artistic practice, stating, “I don't need to sacrifice anything with my art or compromise in any way.”
His latest exhibition is structured around different psychological states and the progression of Levy’s artistic practice, with the final room in the gallery reserved for more overtly raw and experimental works from Levy’s earlier oeuvre. The cavernous underground Shinsegae Gallery serves as an apt location for this exhibition because the space itself functions almost like an emotional pressure chamber in this regard, intensifying the disquieting estrangement already embedded in Levy’s creations like Untitled (Thank You for My Birthday Present) and Untitled (Ask Us If He Was Our Son).
Many of the more abrasive works in the final room were made during a time when Levy was a heroin addict, a period which the artist speaks openly about. This art, one work literally smeared with Levy’s own blood, is overtly nihilistic and a direct record of a tumultuous period in the artist’s life. Levy has since been sober for almost half-a-decade. But he stresses that he has no interest in trying to play into cliches about ‘tortured artists’, saying, “I think there's a big myth in terms of creativity and substance abuse. I think that once a truly prolific creative can push past the need for substances, the work can actually become incredibly spiritual and profound.”
It is a revealing observation because it complicates the mythology surrounding the artist. Levy's fashion label has long operated in an aesthetically anarchic universe of rebellion and cultivated self-destruction. His paintings now, however, increasingly suggest something beyond destruction, despite the title of this latest exhibition.
Or, as Levy may argue, the ‘ruinous’ act of creation is to be celebrated and strived for. According to him, “The most at peace I feel is after I've finished a piece and I'm happy with it. The work is holding a lot of my ego, I think, in the healthiest way. I really put it all into the work.”
Perhaps that is why Levy’s latest creations feel so much more controlled than his previous works. Mind you, for Levy, control does not mean restraint. The surfaces may be highly controlled, the compositions considered and the materials deliberately chosen, yet the emotional impulse remains raw and guttural. The achievement of the artworks, if there is one, lies in remaining unresolved. And it seems that is exactly what Levy wants.
Details
“Final Achievement is Ruin”
Shinsegae Gallery, Boon the Shop Cheongdam
September 2-October 17, 2026
The author is an international art writer. He can be reached at hasnain.nawab1@gmail.com
