Somewhere between the death rattle of contemporary art and the dopamine scream of social media, Martin Levinne just keeps working. Not for attention. Not for applause. Just to survive the noise without becoming it. Stepping down from the empty triumphs of his life, making room for another round of self-important assholes.

Czech-American. Romani. Jewish. Living on his farm in Italy with chickens. A recipe for making the world forget you. Once, he shot campaigns for Prada, Guess, and American Apparel. A brief flirtation with the glossy artifice before it all crumbled. The story? A string of footnotes that don’t matter, but they do because they’re part of the myth: New York, L.A., fashion, art. The whole industrial complex of hollow gestures. And now? He’s out there, in the middle of nowhere—surrounded by decay, silence, and ghosts. Where else would an artist like him end up? No pretensions. Just ruin.

He doesn’t do the tortured genius thing because Levinne isn’t role-playing. He’s not that pathetic. The work is the man. No mask. No costume. Just pure, unadulterated authenticity. It’s ugly. It’s honest. It doesn’t care if you like it or get it. That’s what makes it dangerous.

If you’re looking to label him, don’t bother. He’s not trying to be punk. That’s exactly why he is punk.

His art doesn’t beg for your attention. It doesn’t tweet its trauma or throw itself in your face with the latest hot-button issue. It simply is—unbothered, inevitable, unpolished, and intimate in a way that makes the whole “art world” look like a desperate, pathetic sales pitch.

Take The Secret of the Universe Is in Mortadella. A joke that’s too real to be funny. Massive canvases drenched in absurdity, soaked in grace. A single slice of Italian cold cut as the cosmic axis. Ridiculous? Sure. Sacred? In its own twisted way, yeah. In Levinne’s world, mortadella isn’t just lunch—it’s everything you’ve tried to bury under the shiny veneer of technology, status, and self-importance. A greasy, divine compass pointing to the unavoidable truth: you’re alive, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. But it’s here anyway, and you’re stuck with it.

Calling All Angels? Levinne’s black-and-white portrait series doesn’t beg for empathy. It’s real people—strangers, no casting calls, no gloss. Just raw humanity, exposed. A woman mid-chemo. A washed-up Hollywood actress clinging to dreams with coldest ambition. Their faces don’t scream. They don’t perform. They haunt. Levinne isn’t photographing faces. He’s excavating souls. And it’s not polite. It’s not palatable. But it’s real.

Then there’s The Morphing Men, a photographic series starring queer performer Barry Morse. It’s not drag. It’s not commentary. It’s a visual séance, an exorcism without permission. A colorful circus where Barry Morse morphs into a revolving door of icons—Cher, Hitler, Jesus, Lincoln, Lennon. It’s not about irony. It’s about possession. Levinne captures these moments, freezing the faces in time, like a ghost floating through the bodies of these icons. The result? Discomfort. Unease. It sticks with you, like a bad taste you can’t wash out.

Yes, Levinne has shown almost all around the world—but don’t think he gives a damn. He doesn’t wear his past like a badge of honor. He wears it like dust. No banners. No press releases. No branding of the "successful artist." He’s walked through the smoke of the gallery machine and come out the other side without a single word of regret. The work doesn’t need validation. It doesn’t ask for anything. It simply is—silent, uncompromising, and most dangerously, honest.

Because Levinne isn’t part of the scene. His authenticity doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t market itself. You can’t commodify it. You either see it, or you don’t. And if you don’t? Maybe you’re better off. Or maybe you’re just a part of the noise that’s drowned out everything else.

Because Levinne’s not trying to be remembered. He is an artist. That difference? It’s everything.

And just when you think you’ve had enough of him, Levinne hands you a poem. Unpublished. Unfinished. Raw. It’s brutal, beautiful, and says more in seven lines than most manifestos say in seventy pages. He’s not just a photographer or painter. He’s a poet. The real kind. Not the one with book deals or the one with a publicist. No, he’s the unwanted child of Bukowski, Lana Del Rey, and the collapse of the internet—a poet who strips himself down, slowly, voluntarily, like someone who knows the body’s still worth watching when there’s nothing left to hide.

Levinne’s poetry isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s last words before an execution, a desperate release, an exhale that comes out of nowhere and hits you in the gut. It doesn’t care if you get it. It doesn’t care if it makes you uncomfortable. It wants that. It’s not for validation. It’s not for anyone else. It’s for him.

It’s a stream. Uninterrupted. No punctuation, no rhymes, no neat endings. Just the runoff from a still-young, already-thrashed heart. Not performative, not “confessional”—just what spills out when you stop trying to shape it for an audience. It’s ugly. It’s beautiful. It’s the debris of a mind refusing to edit itself for consumption. What’s left after the performance ends and the noise shuts up? This.

In the end, it’s not about being understood. It’s about being. And if you don’t get it, well, maybe you’re just not supposed to.

In the age of noise, Levinne’s silence—in his photographs, paintings, or poems—doesn’t whisper. It detonates. It doesn’t ask you to watch or listen. It dares you to feel. And dares even harder for you not to.