Sara Berman, Gideon Rubin | The Fold
September 18 - November 20, 2025
Text: Andrew Renton
Some thoughts on the fold, in no particular order.
(Because the fold disrupts what you make of what you see.)
The fold releases the image. The image is unrestricted, without limits. As if it reconstructs itself, or at least offers the possibility, with every folding. The fold suggests that this is a continuous process. This isn’t just about the flexing of technique, although art history would claim otherwise. But rather it’s a strategy to delimit the boundaries of representation.
*
It’s always about surfaces. Working at one with the surface or at odds with it, there’s always a discrepancy between representation and medium. Were those two things to converge (although they never could) the work would become unseeable entirely.
*
There’s a simultaneity to the way that your vision is enabled that can only happen in painting or sculpture. That is, it sets up a privileged perspective of viewing. You’re looking in several directions at once. Or rather, there isn’t a single perspective. The fold was always about this; disruptions in space and time.
*
Imagine you could see through material. After all, How do you represent transparency? It’s an ancient conundrum, which is not only technically but also ethically challenging. A sculptural form where the surface is not the surface. Sculpture is always about the body. Even in abstractions it’s about testing the limits of either what a body might be or what it might do. But what if you are distanced from that body by an illusion of an illusion? You come closer, trying to work it out.
*
So often the figure is turned away. Perhaps because the face, the body, proves unrepresentable. Moreover, in recognising that impossibility, the painting needs to signal that challenge. But in that turning away, some other type of signature must be rendered. It’s something to do with marking process. In the always already folded folds of the kimono, for example, there’s an extension of the body that tracks the body’s movements, and perhaps even modifies how it behaves.
*
What you recognise from elsewhere… The harlequin, another example. Appropriated, reclaimed, in both formal and historical terms. It sets up an ambiguity of identity. Strategically unresolved. The body in motion, not only recomposing itself performatively, but also beyond its own subject, in terms of colour and shape. The fold matters here, because the incompleteness of representation is an ethical decision. It’s a resistance to all the histories and assumptions of representation that you take for granted.
*
At once part of the body and an extension of it, the fold as a type of immaterial prosthesis. It extends the body without adding to it. Part disguise and part freeplay. Or the body in part. The synecdochical representation, which you read in its partial presence. You have the uncanny sense that there was more; that the painting has been cut out of something larger. But you will have to reconstruct this greater absence. The crop as political gesture.
*
There’s always an image on the surface of the cloth or canvas to be disrupted. That disruption is perhaps the narrative of work itself, rather than what is represented on the surface of the ‘image’. What you see is always destined to be incomplete, but your eye does a good job of filling in the gaps. Perhaps the history of the fold is a history of those gaps or missing parts? You can hold in your head the idea of a whole image, even if you don’t know it, or if (by definition) it proves unknowable.
*
To know the image would be to flatten it beyond recognition. Or give it more dimensions than the illusion suggests. More than you know how to read. And the image is always to be about its relation to the body. Either through how the body lends its form or extends itself beyond its physical limits. It’s tempting to talk in terms of distortion but that would imply that the interruptions brought about by the fold were in any way problematic. Indeed, you might argue that your imperfect, incomplete reading of the surface is the only way towards exposition…
*
The fold also conceals, obviously. You spend so much time speaking in terms of representation, but concealment is play, surely, in equal measure. Think of the history of veiling, of the turning away. Every Rokeby Venus revisited. Or more histories of ambiguity. (You can’t trust motive, narrative, expression, gender…)
*
Centuries of precedents. Piero, Titian, Gentileschi, Bernini, Sanmartino, Morandi, Picasso, (Anni) Albers, Hesse, (Lygia) Clark… Or equally, your own list. The fold is always an anxious negotiation with history, establishing and dismantling precedents.
*
Something is always going on beyond or beneath the image. The image is just a starting point for the task of making.
*
“The outside folds and, in folding, constitutes an inside. In a certain way the inside of thought is coextensive with the outside. The outside as what provokes thought, the inside as the unthought in thought.” (This is Deleuze talking about Foucault. You should be careful not to read Deleuze’s take on the fold too literally, or in material terms. Nevertheless, he gives us a language beyond surfaces, beyond the visible.)
*
The fold dismantles hierarchies…. In the end, how do you know what is surface and what is revealed from beneath?
*
Folding onto the fold, where the fold is itself hidden within another fold, or set of folds.
*
Another scenario, where the work comes to you unfolded. Already having been folded and undone. A trace, little more, of the disruptions to the surface. As if you come to the fold belatedly, after the fact. You have a sense of the work in the quiet wake of an event.
Andrew Renton
Sydney, August 2025
