Curator’s Statement

U.F.O. (Untitled Folding Object) 1329 is a solo presentation that consists of a site-specific installation and a series of related drawings by the Brooklyn-based artist Reuven Israel. This exhibition continues the artist’s abiding interest in architecture and sacred spaces’ overlapping and conflicting histories.

Israel responds to the original structure of the gallery at KinoSaito. Formerly a Catholic school, the room’s height and large, gridded windows are reflected in the composition and scale of the installation, tailor-made to fit the space. Its title, Untitled Folding Object, refers to Israel’s ongoing series of tessellated sculptures. The number 1329 is the amount of individual components it consists of. The artist created 1329 small birch elements for this installation, laminating them with colored PVC edge-banding. Each standard part has the potential to unfold like a thread to form countless configurations within the space. The experience may be considered uncanny as if stepping into a pixelated image or a woven rug – an interconnected, total, and enclosed sculptural environment that holds within itself the tension of its unraveling self-destruction.

The piece begins as a flat rectangle on the gallery floor, with a diamond-shaped central void inspired by designs of Islamic courtyards (which often feature water at their center). For each unfolding structure, the segments stretch out and expand into three-dimensional space, leaving more swathes of the bare floor where they once neatly fit.

U.F.O. (Untitled Folding Object) 1329, is inspired by early modernist art movements, as well as Navajo and Hopi weaving traditions, Op Art, science fiction, video games, and sacred geometry. While U.F.O. (Untitled Folding Object) 1329 sprawls the length of the space, with visitors able to walk around it, a series of preliminary drawings adorn the gallery walls, inviting viewers in.

–Kathy Battista

Additional Text by Joshua Cohen

Reuven Israel, born 1978, Jerusalem, and working in New York since 2012, is a sculptor of potential utopias, whose works begin below our feet and end, or never end, above our heads as protean soaring skylines. In plain terms, what this sculpture requires is the construction of a floor, which Israel tends to refer to by an acronym, in a previous installation as F.L.O.O.R.: Formulated, Liminal, Oblique, Openable, Rectangles, and in this show as U.F.O., Untitled Folding Object. This is a mat-like object that consists of rectangular wooden segments, some plain, and others colored. Many of the segments that create this tessellation, this abstract mosaic, are moveable: In the current installation, U.F.O. 1329 (the number referring to the sum of the PVC-laminated birch segments), they can be folded out of the superficially 2-D surface that resembles a technologized Oriental textile and raised above to create the impression of abstracted buildings, office-and-residential structures, or animal-like and plant-like towers, which last however long the artist himself might decide, before being folded back — like retractable limbs — into the body. It's this decision-making process — the choice to activate certain parts of this operable rug or carpet, how and for how long — that turns Israel’s often site-specific sculptures into long-duration performances, kinetic experiments in the creation and evolution and eventual devolution and destruction of an imaginary urbs, utopian — in the purest sense — because unpeopled. It strikes me that some of Israel’s inspiration is suggested by his surname — chiefly the socialism of early Zionism, which was a universalizing ideology applied to a parochial ideology like a glossy veneer atop workaday plywood — while his work also points to engagement in traditional Middle Eastern (Arabic and Persian, as well as Jewish) decorative arts, in which ornament and pattern are not background but foreground, all-ground, usurping representation, which is religiously proscribed. There is a mystical principle at work here, wherein the pieces or tiles that contain a latent ability to express themselves or be expressed in erected 3-D become an analogue to the hidden resources of the alphabet, whose individual letters, when combined by a kabbalist, can function mathematically and speak secret wisdom. Reuven Israel is one of the great kabbalists of abstract sculpture.

–Joshua Cohen