Review: Oren Pinhassi’s Thirst Trap at Commonwealth and Council
Oren Pinhassi. Caryatid II. Steel, sand, burlap, polymer, rock. Approx. 93 x 12.5 x 20 in (236 x 32 x 51 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.
Concepts of ephemerality are intrinsic to the biological and phenological cycles of the natural and material worlds. At first glance, Oren Pinhassi’s striking array of totemic monoliths allude to the grandest of Palmyran columns rising and vanishing into the arid desert landscape. His sculptures channel Alberto Giacometti’s elongated figures such as Tall Woman I, 1960, and also continue the experiential processes of Costantino Nivola’s sandcastle reliefs. Through the use of multifarious materials including steel, sand, burlap, rocks, and found objects, the artist generates bewitching, flesh-like works that act as representational anatomical figures. Pinhassi’s Thirst Trap, at Commonwealth and Council, is an unforgettable solo exhibition that interrogates the polarization of mechanical, elemental, and societal laws of obsolescence and attraction.
Oren Pinhassi. Untitled, 2021. Steel, sand, burlap, polymer, rock, pigeon spikes. Approx. 93.5 x 10 x 19.25 in (237 x 25 x 49 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.
Borrowing from the logic and principles of Gothic architecture, Pinhassi intends to escape modernist traps of categorization. Modernism has been historically exclusionary and figuration has largely disappeared from contemporary architecture and objects. Gothic architecture borrows from natural principles, in which ornaments can become structural. Fundamentally, an arch may appear as a vegetal motif but may also function as a supportive component. Untitled, 2021, examines the separation between exterior and interior, structure and deconstruction; a vaulted tip connoting the architecture of cathedrals. A fin-like extrusion along the sculpture’s lean physique features a disk-shaped aperture that recalls Barbara Hepworth’s sculptural series, The Family of Man, 1970. Hepworth’s inquisitive exploration of negative space and her relationship to solidity and emptiness were emphasized through the openings carved into her sculptures. Like Hepworth, Pinhassi also processes interdependence within empty space by examining partitions that separate bodies and their impact on society at large. Bank transaction windows, fast food drive thrus, and glory holes all act as quasi-anonymous exchange systems. In this manner, emptiness can be seen as a sociological exchange that can perform as a point of accessibility or line of demarcation.
In lovers, 2021, a slender shaft with a small pocket focuses attention onto four toes sticking out over a granite rock pedestal, along with pigeon spikes attached to an umbrella-like shade. The suggestion of feet is of particular importance to Pinhassi, as each form, perched precariously on the edge of a rock, relates to recumbent statues. Life-sized funerary effigies were popular in medieval times as in the royal necropolis under the Basilica of Saint-Denis near Paris. Tombs portrayed deceased individuals dressed in their everyday clothes and commonly featured symbolic animals at the foot of the sculpture that were thought of as divine protectors in the afterlife. Although the tombs portray the figures lying on their backs, bodies were sculpted standing upright. While Pinhassi’s sculptures are positioned in erect stances, they also question the relationship between verticality and horizontality, life and death.
Oren Pinhassi. lovers, 2021. Steel, sand, burlap, polymer, rock, pigeon spikes. Approx. 100 x 25.25 x 25.25 in (254 x 64 x 64 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.
Pinhassi’s sculptures explore the tension that exists between figuration and abstraction in relationship to functional objects. Vinyl covers are predominantly utilized in everyday life as a synthetic material for the use of shower curtains, raincoats, and furniture covers. However, vinyl also suggests nudity, vulnerability, and can be used to analyze the separation of bodies. Untitled (fountain), 2021, features two vertical legs with footed ligaments gripped on a rock. One leg is wrapped in a sewn vinyl jacket that wraps around a bulbous extrusion, while the other has two hollow gaps. A delicate, see-through vinyl cover drapes over the form, conveying the presence of water. Topped with symmetrical stepped discs in an ascending order, the sculpture evokes the shape of a traditional fountain. The artist explores the temporality of a suggested dryness and invites its opposing wetness which connects the erotic as a force of construction.
Oren Pinhassi. Caryatid II. Steel, sand, burlap, polymer, rock. Approx. 93 x 12.5 x 20 in (236 x 32 x 51 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.
By use of raw materials, each work interweaves architecture and sculpture to devise a subspecies of human-like forms made from sand. The loss of boundaries as a logic for construction suggests the potential for something less violent, authoritarian, or threatening. As found in nature, sand is the product of erosion and decay. It is a material that suggests fragility, suppressed temporality, and a finite immortality. Relating to sculpted figures that act as architectural support columns, Caryatid II, 2021, is composed of a lanky form with dual openings standing erectly atop a stone. Caryatids and telamons were initially utilized by the ancient Greeks to support entablatures at temples like the Acropolis. Figurations like hands lifting a balcony have a human consciousness that represent physical, gravitational, and abstract forces. As ornamental, yet functioning pillars, the caryatids have transgressed history with their use heightened during Roman times, the Renaissance, and reemphasized by works such as Fallen Caryatid Carrying her Stone, 1881, by Auguste Rodin.
Concerned with the temporality of our bodies, codependence on other bodies, and the malleability of technology, Pinhassi works through his materials to interpret Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias. Shelley’s sonnet describes “lone and level sands” in which a king’s fallen statue, meant to represent immortality, drowns in the dunes of the desert. Notions of everlastingness are perpetuated in today’s world through cloud storage systems, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, amongst many other examples. Humanity has been on a utopian search for an “elixir of life” for millennia but regardless of pursuit, the truth lies in factual desuetude and ephemeral co-existence.
On a final note, we live in a time where technological abstraction can eliminate functional comprehension, manufacture irresistibility, and create an opaque reality. Pinhassi subverts and questions the obsolescence of everyday objects and the function of conventional materials. Thirst Trap challenges the viewer to break down binaries between technology, our bodies, and the architecture we inhabit.
Thirst Trap at Commonwealth and Council runs through October 23.