In his portrait series, the Austrian artist Aldo Tolino deconstructs, folds, reassembles and weaves printed photographs in order to create origami-like sculptural pieces. Tolino then re-photographs the works, converting the pieces back into two-dimensional objects. The disturbing quality of the images may not just be due to the fact that the folded faces appear distorted, disproportional and almost entirely stripped of identity. In their conversion back to a photographic object, these pieces also suggest a cycle of infinite reprocessing and deformation, wherein the portrait will only continue to move further away from the original “true” image. This perhaps serves to remind us of the precarious nature of photography itself; the lack of control we have over photographic images, the instability of their meaning and function, which can be both liberating and unsettling.
