Litanies of Form
Rafi Ajl’s latest exhibition, ‘Litanies’, presented by Pallas in San Francisco, offers a rich encounter with the process of making. Here, function and poetry walk in lockstep, and objects speak not only of utility but of inquiry, memory and devotion.
In a converted barn-turned-workshop in Berkeley, California, Ajl spends his days at the edge of material tension – folding, soldering, carving and casting until something new emerges. “Objects are performative acts,” Ajl says. “They are resistances; the table resists dispersal so we can gather.” In ‘Litanies’, resistance becomes ritual. Sculptural chairs, steel mesh pendants and cast-aluminium cabinets are staged as meditations on structure and surrender. Each form begins with a grid, a framework of Western logic, only to be disrupted by chance, entropy or gesture.
Ajl’s practice hinges on systems. Not rigid ones, but ones built to be broken. “I often create machines or processes that I set into motion,” he explains. “The actions create emergent things. I’ll find that the unexpected result is more compelling than the original idea, and I’ll divert chasing those new lines of energy.”
There’s an unmistakable intimacy in Ajl’s approach. His surfaces are not pristine; they’re engraved, patinated, sewn and scorched. The stainless-steel mesh that appears throughout ‘Litanies’ came from a memory – a curtain he helped fabricate for a landscape architect over a decade ago. “There was just something about that material that lodged itself in my head. Years later, I pulled it from a sample box and decided to figure it out. It behaves like fabric but also like sheet metal. It’s hard but ethereal. I think there’s something enchanting about that.”
Raised in Brooklyn in a home filled with folk art, antique furniture and quilts, Ajl was immersed early in a culture of making. His mother, a quilter, taught him how to sew and see in colour. These origins reverberate through his current work, where repetition, ritual and imperfection are welcomed as part of the process. “There’s a sense of longing built into the work – thinking about beauty, about expression, about vulnerability.”
‘Litanies’ is a culmination of these inquiries. Cabinets house fragments of cast metal and quilted wood. Glass vessels, slumped from striated wooden moulds, sag with intention. Chairs become stages for deviation – a grid giving way to a burnish, an engraving, a fracture. “Neither function nor poetry lead,” Ajl says. “They dance together.”
While some of his pieces are made for use, others are purely conceptual. In all cases, they ask more than they answer. “I think there’s an increasing desire for people to surround themselves with objects that perhaps raise questions, ones that don’t behave or domesticate too easily.”
For Ajl, the workshop is both laboratory and sanctuary, a space of freedom and constraint, precision and play. His practice invites viewers to witness not just the finished object, but the energy that shaped it. ‘Litanies’is not a conclusion, but an offering – a tincture of material, memory and method, stitched, soldered and set into motion.
