PARIS.- Besides the baroque’s obsession with the fold, often erotically overwhelming or spiritually elevating the human body – or both at the same time - the fold as a formal and conceptual principle in art is rather rare compared to flatness and the straight line. It could be tempting to extend the early Modernism’s contempt of the ornament to the fold, with its implications of something complex, hidden and opaque, as opposed to simplicity, exteriority and transparency. A few exceptions by major modernist artists only seem to confirm the rule, such as Simon Hantaï’s folded, painted canvas, Lucio Fontana’s transformative cuts, creating disruptive folds in the flat canvas, Christo’s wrapped buildings, proposing a new topography through the monumental folds of the fabric, Robert Morris’ folding felt sculptures, determined by the weight and gravity, and John Chamberlain’s crushed and folded car parts. Both Morris and Chamberlain transform matter through forces that fold — gravity in Morris, compression in Chamberlain — letting the material “speak” through its folds.


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The idea of letting the material speak through its folds is a central theme in the exhibition Worlds Unfolded. In Eske Rex’ Unfolded Plank III, a wood plank reveals its hidden, inner life, through the artist’ cut and steam bending of the wood, freezing the opening in an extended, silent moment. In Mikko Paakkanen’s Marilyn, a sculptural light suspension made of white loose cloth and LED with an integrated motor, the slow rotation turns the soft fabric into voluptuously folds, a clin d’oeil to Marilyn Monroe’s dress over the subway grate in the movie, The Seven Year Itch. It is, not surprisingly, in textile art however that the fold has fully flourished as a physical and conceptual phenomenon, opening up for new ways of forming and thinking. One of the most interesting artists today, thinking through textile and color, is Margrethe Odgaard, who embraces such diverse fields as color research, optic science, literature and poetry. Her table nap Fold Unfold (2010) embodies in itself a kind of manifest on the fold, enhancing what is traditionally considered as a problem: Indeed, most of the time, a tablecloth is kept folded in a closet, waiting for the occasion to dress the table, and as a consequence the folds become an inevitable part of visual appearance when unfolded on the table. Instead of ignoring the folds as a practical necessity, Fold Unfold makes a point out of them. By blending a printed pattern with the folds, Odgaard makes the fold become part of the pattern, both highlighting and camouflaging the folds.


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Odgaard’s latest works, Ophelia Letters, are formed as big letters, made of multiple layers of silk organza. The silk layers are structured by concave and convex folds, valley and mountain folds as the artist calls them, that counterbalance the vibrating, fleeting nature of colors, transfigured by light. Drawing on the historical traditions of Renaissance letter folding, the Ophelia Letters engage with the material structure of the letter as much as its symbolic weight. The layered silk organza, in colors that shift with light and folds that open into shadow, transforms Odgaard’s emotional landscape into a tactile and luminous experience, “…a space for reflection in which language falls short. Like breath drawn before a name is spoken, they mark the moment where language begins to unfold. A tracing of undercurrents. A pause before the offering….”

The idea of something unfolding, transforming itself, through the fold is central to the works of the exhibition, Worlds Unfolded. The conceptual and philosophical premises of the fold have been masterly explored by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his book, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.

Deleuze examines how Leibniz conceived of the world not as a set of fixed substances, but as a dynamic network, in which the concept of the fold is central: it illustrates how reality unfolds and folds continuously, without rupture. For Deleuze, the fold is about process, how matter, bodies, and subjects are formed and transformed. The opposite of fold is not flatness, but rather a lack of transformation, stasis, rigidity. The fold as process and as a vehicle of constant transformation is at the core of Astrid Krogh’s My Golden Horizon (2020). Using gold leaf to convey the deep glow and power of the sun, the artist has pleated the metal which, according to the depth of the pleat and the surrounding light, modulates the color nuances of the work. Through this subtle play with light and shadow, Krogh creates a gleaming, everchanging horizon of sunsets and sunrises.

In her later work, Square of the Universe, made of folded aluminum foil, impregnated with pure pigment and platinum leaf, the folds are unfolded into a multifaceted, deep blue relief, through which the artist conveys a profound, poetic feeling of the Universe. In Hanne Friis’ soft sculptures, the transformative force of the fold takes a more organic turn. With a needle and a nylon thread, the artist has pleated fabric into dense volumes, that generate a sense of change and growth, reminiscent of skin folds, tree bark and topographic structures. “My sculptures have the potential to grow, and because I have to use a lot of strength to make them, the power of creation is also par t of it… They used to be more vulnerable, but now I increasingly see vitality and strength in them – there is so much power in all living things.”

The Baroque, according to Deleuze, expresses the idea that interior and exterior are not separate but linked by folds, like the human brain with its folds. The concept applies to matter as well as to the soul, to the body as well as to thought, and in this Deleuzian sense, Friis’ work could indeed be considered as truly “baroque.“

More than a treatise on the baroque, Deleuze explores how these notions influence the perception of time and space, emphasizing continuity and transformation rather than stability, thus reflecting a universe in perpetual becoming. The kinetic photos of Etienne Bertrand Weill and Rodophe Proverbio from the 1950s to the 1970s are evolving in a state of constant metamorphosing. Generated by the artists from manipulating self-made tools in front of a camera or directly on the photosensitive paper in the darkroom, the traces of light are captured, echoing the movement of the artist. Proverbio compares the movements to that of a dancer, engaging the whole body. Made from small perforated boxes with a light source inside, he compares his works to light paintings or “light-weavings.” E.B. Weill, on the other hand, manipulates small reflecting mobiles in front of the camera lens, inspired by classical and concrete music, inventing a new kind of photography, born from the confluence of sound and light, matter and movement: “A static aspect is replaced by a new image, crystallization of an object’s movement in space and time. All that remains from shape is a new transient appearance; Métaforme is the name, which seems to best define it. Its medium is photography.”

As we can see, the fold is expanding beyond the realm of textile art, with artists coming from various horizons such as photography, architecture, crafts and design, exploring the fold and the way it allows to them think and form. The woven structures of bended wood in Kuwahata & Winter’s little wood “pillow”, Fletverk, is inspired by Japanese interior design and textile art. Fletverk, meaning a ‘Work of Weaving’ in Danish, is a sculptural wooden ‘cushion’ made from 12 woven ribbons of compressed beech wood.

When steam bent, the compression process emphasizes the elasticity and softness of the wood. When dried, the wood retains its firm and final shape. The work of the craftsman here joins the work of the sculptor, just like in Rasmus Fenhann’s origami-like furniture pieces, Hikari and Kubo. Geometric shapes have fascinated mankind ever since antiquity, but Fenhann uses computer technology to unfold its boundless abundance. The polyhedron is one of his favorite geometric forms, featured in many variations in his Hikari lamps (hikari meaning ‘light’ in Japanese). Thinness and lightness achieve their most exquisite expression in the origami-inspired lamps, meticulously produced in 1.8-mm Oregon pine veneer and Japanese shoji paper. Louise Campbell equally explores the structural and sculptural potentials of the fold in her Folda sofa and her Casual Cupboards, in which the hybrid dimension of the fold opens up new functional possibilities.

What these artists and designers have in common is their way of thinking through their material and technique, with no a priori, all the time discovering new forms and ideas. Deleuze compares the act of thinking to that of a baker kneading dough,
evoking the transformation of the square into a rectangle, then into two opposing halves, thus illustrating the process of transformation and deformation in thought. This metaphor illustrates the idea that thought, like dough, is constantly transforming, unfolding and refolding, creating new configurations and understandings. We don’t think from a distance but in direct contact with the material, in a bodily and sensory act. This idea is central to Cecilie Bendixen, who let herself guide by the inherent logics of materials, through which she gains inspiration and knowledge from movement and form through touch and sight, carefully observing how a specific material can be approached.

In 2013, Bendixen made in a Ph.D. research project on textiles and sound, outlining the project’s two main questions: How can sound be shaped by textile and conversely how can textiles be shaped by sound? These questions have formed a series of sound absorbing textile sculptures and installations, such as the Wave suspension, in which the artist has pleated and handstitched the textile in order to enhance the sound absorption, leading to an interesting interaction between form, light, shadow and thought. In the words of the artist: “The thread forms itineraries, systems and textures in which our thoughts are located, and new ways of organizing matter, allowing different thoughts, opening new paths in unknown terrain.”