Reuven Israel: Scaffolding (after Buffalmacco)

In the 14th century frescoes attributed to Buonamico Buffalmacco at the Camposanto in Pisa, the serpent winds through the pictorial space as a secondary yet decisive figure. An organic line that coils repeatedly around the condemned souls in hell, it gestures toward sin itself: coiling, persistent, unrelenting. The serpent is not only a symbol of temptation or punishment but also a structure: a recurring, continuous line guiding the gaze from top to bottom, from the divine to the human. It is, in essence, scaffolding, a skeleton that supports the composition and theological architecture of the painting, a system of relationships between body, sin, matter, and spirit.

From this point grows Reuven Israel’s new exhibition. It is not a depiction of hell or a religious interpretation, but rather an attempt to transform Buffalmacco’s formal language, the twist, the arch, the coil, into an abstract system of relations between parts, material, and form, between light and shadow. The new series of sculptures he creates, composed of circles and semicircles connected in a precise rhythm, maintains the tension Israel discovered in Buffalmacco: the tension between order and destruction, between wholeness and fragmentation, between reality and imagination.

The exhibition space feels like an entrance into Buffalmacco’s painting: just as the fresco’s center presents a colossal demon entwined with serpents, Israel places at the heart of the show a monumental sculpture that echoes the contour of that figure. Around it are smaller sculptures made of laminated layers of metal (brass and stainless steel) and exposed solid wood. The combination of materials reinforces and repeats the sinuous line.

Reuven Israel (b. Jerusalem, 1978) is a graduate of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (MFA 2007, BFA 2004). He lives and works in New York. His work emerges from influences spanning science fiction, theology, art history, and architecture, systems in which form and function share a common principle of precision and tension. Over the past two decades, Israel has developed a refined sculptural language in which materials such as polished wood, metal, and automotive paint form coherent units identical in mechanism yet shifting in sensory meaning. Like the construction of a temple or a machine, his process attends meticulously to each detail and to the balance between parts. Repetition, measurement, and accuracy are not merely aesthetic concerns; they become a spiritual act, a kind of organized ritual.

The scaffolding is both an idea and an object. Like in architecture, it represents an in-between state, a skeleton that holds the potential of a building yet is not the building itself. So too are Israel’s sculptures: abstract, delicate, precise, suspended between completion and collapse, between the sacred and the mundane.

In the wall works featured in the exhibition, a circle is split into two halves: one glossy black, the other natural and pale. Israel explores the tension between opposites. The connection between the halves is exact but incomplete, a bond formed between edges that can never be one. The simple form echoes the serpentine movement of Buffalmacco’s fresco, while the dual materiality, black and light, marks the passage between light and darkness, visibility and concealment. As in the frescoes of Pisa, the binary division is not absolute; the separated parts depend on one another for existence. Israel poses a visual-theological question: can faith be held in two halves? And what remains when wholeness is built upon separation rather than unity?

In this sense, his work can be understood through Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics. Rancière writes that “modernism and postmodernism are not merely successive historical periods, but two sides of the same coin: one seeking order and perfection, the other dismantling them and leaving room for uncertainty and freedom of experience.” Within this space, where disintegration and structure coexist, art becomes an act of reconfiguration, a redefinition of how the world is seen and felt through form. As Rancière notes: “Art redefines the forms of visibility of the shared world; it changes the places and capacities of subjects.” So too in Israel’s work: the form itself , the union of halves, of light and shadow, of matter and spirit, alters how the world is perceived and sensed. It proposes a structure that does not seek unity but sustains tension as the very substance of faith.

In many ways, Israel’s practice is an exploration of belief without religion, a theology of matter. He establishes a formal language in which engineering precision acquires a spiritual dimension. The sculpture is not an object made in the image of something but an act of creation that seeks to understand structure itself as faith. If in Buffalmacco’s fresco the serpent served as an instrument of punishment and warning, in Israel’s work it becomes a symbol of continuous movement, of perpetual becoming.

Rather than painting hell, Israel builds the scaffolding that holds humanity between heaven and earth. The sculptures resemble futuristic architectures, spiritual machines that mediate between the ancient and the technological.

The exhibition presents an ambiguous vision. On one hand, it continues the iconographic tradition in which the serpent symbolizes temptation and sin; on the other, it transforms that image into a tool of construction, measurement, and comprehension. As with Buffalmacco, the viewer is invited to look not at redemption or damnation, but at the in-between at the scaffolding itself that holds the world.

Thus, Israel’s work oscillates between myth and function. It employs minimalist aesthetics to ask age old questions of trust, transcendence, and connection. For Israel, sculpture has become, over the past decades, a site of non-religious spirituality, a space where matter itself bears faith in structure, precision, and the ever-elusive possibility of perfection.

Sources:

Hell in the Byzantine World (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (Verso, 2011).

Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Continuum, 2010).