When I am folding, I am objective and that allows me to lose myself.
—Simon Hantaï
Folding-unfolding no longer simply means tension-release, contraction-dilation, but enveloping-developing, involution-evolution.
—Gilles Deleuze
The act of folding is both a concept and a formal process. Folding as action, illusion, and symbol has appeared throughout contemporary art and literature, from Simon Hantaï’s literal process of folding the canvas, dousing it in oil paint, then unfolding it to reveal inadvertent yet lyrical patterns; to Gilles Deleuze’s influential meditation The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988), in which the world is interpreted as an infinity of surfaces twisting through time and space; to Tatiana Trouvé’s recent Refoldings sculptures cast from discarded and refolded packing materials.
For Robert Rauschenberg the act of folding produced Freeway Glut (1986), a muscular assemblage of manipulated industrial parts; while John Chamberlain worked lightly and in miniature with resin-coated crumpled paper. Some works involve aleatory processes that transcend artistic control, such as Hantaï’s Blanc (1974), or Davide Balula’s canvases that he immersed in soil or in rivers, allowing incidental organic residue to take hold.
In Tension and Interlude (2018) Florencia folded the canvas to create a grid; to further bend time while creating a ripple effect. There is an earthly yet perishable role in the genesis of the folded form, folding has shown to be an arterial process through which diverse works literally or symbolically turn in on themselves.
