Born and raised in Lima, Peru, Levi Japhet arrived in the United States at nineteen, leaving behind familiar landscapes to navigate the chaos, contradictions, and creative potential of American life. With an academic background in architecture, Japhet’s visual work is grounded in spatial awareness—how environments shape human emotion, movement, and identity.
Their practice spans oil painting and experimental filmmaking, with storytelling as the connective tissue. Japhet’s short film It’s a Cartoony Life! was screened at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and marked a turning point in their career, affirming a desire to pursue expressive, multidisciplinary work.
Now based in New York, Japhet paints from their studio in Sunset Park, using oil as a narrative device—a medium to unearth stories that might otherwise remain buried. Writing often precedes the act of painting, giving shape to characters, moods, and architectural settings. Drawing influence from Francis Bacon, Marc Chagall, and Martin Wong, Japhet captures surreal slices of urban life, where shadows, memory, and identity blend into layered compositions full of longing and grit.
Their work explores the absurdity and ache of queer existence, the humor in sadness, and the quiet violence of being misunderstood. Rooted in expressionist and poetic realist traditions, Japhet’s paintings refuse to sanitize; they sit with discomfort, amplify small truths, and speak in a visual language that feels lived in and unflinching.
Origin: Lima, Peru
Currently Exhibiting in: Bushwick, Brooklyn
Website: levijaphet.myportfolio.com
Social Media: Instagram: @levijaphet
Featured Artwork at Bushwick Gallery
Dos panas en Second Ave.
Year of Creation: 2025
Medium: Oil paint on processed drawing paper
Dimensions: 6″ x 9″
Price: $1,100
Description:
This work arrives like a hazy memory—two figures caught in the quiet charge of a shared night. Set against a muted, crumbling façade of Second Avenue, Dos panas en Second Ave. pulls from a real encounter with a friend and coworker, recast through distorted recollection. Rendered in oil with a sense of smudged immediacy, the piece captures that threshold between companionship and disorientation, between the concrete and the poetic. Here, the city watches and swallows, turning a drunken search for missing glasses into a portrait of youth, intimacy, and impermanence.
Happy Hour in Bushwick
Year of Creation: 2024
Medium: Oil paint on paper
Dimensions: 18” x 24”
Price: N/A
Description:
Set in a familiar Bushwick corner where afternoons stretch long and shadows lean heavy, Happy Hour in Bushwick is a portrait of contradiction. A man sits before a banana and a beer, his expression unreadable—caught between presence and retreat. The vibrant red backdrop, graffitied shirt, and looming architecture conjure the overstimulation of the city. At the painting’s core is a moment of queerness and friendship—subtle, unspoken. A love letter in disguise, this piece fuses absurdity with emotional density, capturing the fragile grace of things left unsaid.
Exhibition Information
April 2025: Urban Narratives: The City as Canvas
Curated by: Fern Messa Joson
Theme: Turning the cityscape into a canvas, this exhibition captures the raw, vibrant energy of urban life through graffiti, street photography, painting, and more.
Exhibition Dates: April 3 – April 10, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 3 | 6 PM – 8 PM
Guided audio experience
For accessibility, the full video transcript is provided below for those who prefer to read or are unable to listen.
“At just six by nine inches, Dos panas en Second Ave. draws you in with the intimacy of a found photograph—but linger, and it begins to shift. Two figures hover in the murky warmth of a city night, their forms slightly blurred, like a memory being replayed with frayed edges. The street is familiar—Second Avenue—but the way it’s rendered feels less like a place and more like a feeling: fragile, flickering, unscripted.
Levi Japhet paints from lived experience, and this piece recalls a real moment shared with a friend—a drunken search for missing glasses. But beneath the humor lies something weightier: a study in closeness and vulnerability. The way the figures lean into the night, into each other, speaks of youth, of queer friendship, of that liminal space between chaos and comfort.
Notice the textures—the processed drawing paper lets the oil soak in just enough to feel worn, lived-in. It’s a surface that absorbs both paint and emotion. The background crumbles softly, like architecture in a dream, while the figures pulse with immediacy.
Japhet doesn’t offer polished nostalgia. Instead, they give us a kind of poetic realism—messy, tender, unresolved. Dos panas en Second Ave. is a portrait of a night that doesn’t need to be fully remembered to be deeply felt. You don’t need to know the whole story. Just feel the charge between them.”