Artist Talk 05/31: Ian Svenonius hosts Levenson & Aguayo

A to L and Back Again

Dan Levenson & Nick Aguayo

to June 5 in two sites, appts advised:

Oolong Gallery

6030 La Flecha RSF, CA 92067

Tu-Sat 11-5PM

The Brown Studio

1144 N Coast Hwy 101 Encinitas, CA 92024

Mo-Fr 9-6PM

Special Event May 31

at the Brown Studio, tickets available here

view this email if your browser

Installation view at Oolong, Rancho Santa Fe (image credit: Philipp S. Rittermann)

Oolong Gallery is proud to present the first duo exhibition A to L and Back Again between Dan Levenson and Nick Aguayo, two Los Angeles-based painters and close friends working with geometric abstraction, whose practices explore authorship and the constructed nature of art-making—both conceptually and materially.

Together, Aguayo and Levenson offer complementary yet divergent takes on abstract painting. Aguayo’s work celebrates material experimentation and chromatic exuberance, while Levenson’s deadpan conceptualism peels back the veneer of modernist aesthetics to expose the cultural machinery behind the image.

This exhibition stages a powerful first pairing between their work building on the dialogue between process and performance, authorship and anonymity, sincerity and strategy—an encounter that reveals as much about the making of art as it does about the systems that make artists.

Nick Aguayo

Her (Del Monte), 2024

Acrylic and marble dust on canvas

40 x 30 x 1 in

Dan Levenson

Corinne Dingetschweiler, 2025

Oil and grapite on linen

A0 (47” x 33”, 1189 x 841mm)

Dan Levenson

Vreneli Hottinger, 2023

Oil and graphite on linen

A1 format (33” x 23.5”)

Nick Aguayo

Blue, 2024

Acrylic and marble dust on canvas

48" x 36" x 1 ¹⁄₂"

(121.92 x 91.44 x 3.81 cm)

Nick Aguayo

Ord, 2023

Acrylic and marble dust on canvas

32 ¹⁄₄" x 32 ¹⁄₄" x 2 ¹⁄₄"

(81.91 x 81.91 x 5.71 cm)

Dan Levenson

Franco Sigg, 2017

Oil and graphite on linen

A0 (47” x 33”, 1189 x 841mm)

Dan Levenson

Sabine Klinger, 2025

Oil and graphite on linen

A1 format (33” x 23.5”)

Nick Aguayo

Disguise, 2024

Acrylic and marble dust on canvas

36 x 36 in

Dan Levenson

Frankl Bürgi, 2024

Oil and graphite on linen

A1 format (33” x 23.5”)

Nick Aguayo

Mariscos (Blue Monday), 2024

Acrylic and marble dust on canvas

40 x 30 x 1 in

Dan Levenson’s art practice operates as a conceptual mirror, reflecting and refracting the frameworks that underpin the production of art itself. Levenson fabricates a fictional world: The State Art Academy, Zürich (SKZ), a modernist art school supposedly shuttered in 1999. His paintings—signed by invented students with convincingly Swiss names—mimic a fading aesthetic language reminiscent of mid-century formalism. Cracked, weathered, and stripped of narrative cues, these works are not merely paintings, but “student assignments” from a bygone pedagogical system. By employing standardized formats, archival references, and institutional trappings like lockers and shipping crates, Levenson critiques the myth of the lone artistic genius, instead pointing to the structures—schools, markets, national identity—that shape and define creativity.

What appears as austere modernist painting is, in Levenson’s hands, a seductive theatrical prop—a playful performance of authorship, a sleight of hand. Through this ongoing conceptual framework, the artist raises urgent questions: What constitutes artistic identity? How are artists produced, not just creatively, but institutionally?

Nick Aguayo’s paintings by contrast are immersive, materially-rich compositions that oscillate between structure and improvisation. Working with acrylic paint infused with marble dust, Aguayo creates hyper-matte, textural surfaces that embody a vigorous and tactile approach to painting. Through gestures of pressing, dragging, and layering, he builds dense visual fields where bold geometric forms collide with errant marks, residual pockmarks, and erratic bursts of color. His palette evokes pop references, from the RGB hues of old TV screens to the exuberance of Sister Mary Corita Kent’s prints and Warhol’s Flowers. But beneath the surface lies a vulnerable and deliberate negotiation: erasures and edits remain visible, forms seem in motion, and compositions act like actors in a play. Aguayo’s work straddles spontaneity and control. His energetic canvases—anchored in personal and spatial memory—feature recurring shapes inspired by shadows, thrifted fabrics, and architectural forms from his everyday life.

Nick Aguayo

Cochineal, 2024

Acrylic and marble dust on canvas

48" x 36" x 1 ¹⁄₂"

Dan Levenson

Bettina Braunschweiler, 2016

Oil and graphite on linen

A0 (47” x 33”, 1189 x 841mm)

Dan Levenson is a Los Angeles based visual artist working in installation, performance, video, painting, and sculpture. His work takes the form of artifacts rescued from the ruins of an imaginary art school: the State Art Academy, Zürich (its initials in Swiss-German are SKZ). The paintings follow the strict formalist pedagogy of this imaginary school: metrically sized canvases are divided geometrically to create rational and reproducible abstract compositions. I expand on the story through performance, installation and video.

Each painting title is a unique name meant to represent a student in the imaginary State Art Academy, Zürich. Each name is used only once. In 2004 he used a computer script to combine each surname from the Zürich phone book with a list of common Swiss first names in every possible unique combination. This generated a list of hundreds of millions of unique names. 135,000 of these names were mixed up randomly and printed in this book. The titles for his paintings are drawn in random order from the same list. CV

Nick Aguayo paints compellingly layered abstract works that reveal an inventive approach to the materiality and physicality of paint. Emphasizing the performative aspects of dragging, pressing, brushing, and rolling paint onto canvas, Aguayo layers hand-rendered geometric shapes, building his compositions around the tensions between erasure and transparency, accumulation and excavation. Taking cues from collage, Aguayo densely coats his canvases with thick impasto surfaces, textural areas of paint, and materials including marble dust, to create a matte physicality to each composition.

Nick Aguayo (b. 1984 in Palm Springs, CA) received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007 and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine in 2012. Aguayo has been the subject of solo exhibitions at La Loma Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; and the Undergraduate Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

His work has been included in group exhibitions at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY; Brand Library & Art Center, Glendale, CA; California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA; Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; SHRINE, Los Angeles, CA; The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; Tif Sigfrids, Comer, GA; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA; University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, and elsewhere.

His work may be found in the collections of The Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY and the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. CV