New York
Oren Pinhassi’s “Losing Face” (on view through October 12, 2024) features five totemic sculptures that feel like standing bodies. Constructed through a distinctive process of layering sand over burlap-wrapped steel armatures, these faceless geometric/anthropomorphic structures defy consistency of form, yet each one stands on a base of toed “feet” that resemble soft talons gripping a stone. This merger of human, animal, and abstract forms is characteristic of Pinhassi, whose sculptural practice investigates our bodily relationship to architecture and its spatial politics. In “Losing Face,” he continues this inquiry by focusing on how meaning and feeling are communicated and recognized not through perception (sight, hearing, or speech), but through the somatic experience of being together in space.
In the title work, which is shortest of the group (all are around seven feet tall), a tulip-like form blossoms from a stem like a goblet. But it’s impossible for this vessel to contain anything since its surface is punctured by rows of circular cavities. Though porous, Losing Face (2024) gains heft from its stone base and the rough-hewn texture of the sand, its weight further implied by what it might hold if it only could. Walking around the sculpture and peering through the apertures emphasizes a certain interiority, imparting the sense that the inner self is formulated in relation to the exterior world.
Relationships among the works are explored through variation and contrast. Like Losing Face, Blind Spot—II (2023), a slender, oar-like pillar vented with a triangular orifice at its peak, explores permeability; the juxtaposition of circular and rectangular openings in the two works creates a sense of the mutability that comes with passing through space. Unlike the other works, Truth Teller (2024), with three limbs made of collected spheres, accumulates material instead of stacking negative spaces. Nevertheless, it implies a sense of (inverse) porosity: the balls could be the circles removed from Losing Face, only enlarged and expanded into three dimensions. The planar Gather Round (2024) forms a clear contrast to the spongy and spherical. The rectangular, vertically oriented void at its center, which runs perpendicular to two architectonic horizontals, is the largest perforation in any of the works. The formal tension between permeable and impermeable within and between these works corresponds to Pinhassi’s thematic interest in porosity in queer spaces or places in which bodies (human or material) conjoin in generative friction with one another. It’s only through the experience of others that we evolve and grow into something more fully ourselves.
Bodies are alluded to throughout “Losing Face,” with Pinhassi’s poetic titles hinting at intimacy through the sharing or hiding of knowledge. To “lose face” roughly means to lose respect, but Pinhassi treats the idiom literally, using it to explore what it means to engage with the body not through individuality but through sense and feeling. The suggestion of legs, feet, and toes in each work (which relates to medieval recumbent tomb effigies) compels a search for other body parts, drawing us close to and around each sculpture. This physical viewing is especially acute with the most oblique work, Mourner no.3 (Night Shower) (2024), which implies not only tears, but also cleansing. However, there is nothing literal about this allusive form, which is defined by a scallop-edged cylinder. Up close, the craggy, granular surface reinforces the realness of Pinhassi’s material—sand. Derived from rocks like those on which the effigy-inspired toes perch, sand is a porous material that can hold and erode space and bodies. An elementary building material, sand also represents the dust to which our bodies will return after death. While alive, those bodies interact with our selves, with others, and with our environment, contouring not only what we think but how we feel. In “Losing Face,” Pinhassi considers what happens when our bodies share a space, everything inevitably evolving as we move through in relation to each other.
