JALEH MANSOOR
ing less as an explanatory model for Tuerlinckx’s object production and more as an analog for her mode and economy of work, is Gilles Deleuze’s contention that “the baroque does not refer to an essence, but rather to an operative function. It endlessly creates folds. It does not invent the thing, but it twists and turns the folds, takes them to infinity, fold upon fold, fold after fold.”6 Deleuze insists that the fold — the baroque’s salient characteristic — accounts for the movement’s formal and structural specificity by describing the way that it operates rather than its static aspects. What defines the baroque is the fold as a continuous circuit of process that traverses identities, discrete objects, and specific mediums. The fold: The baroque invents the infinite work or operation. The problem is not how to finish a fold but how to continue it, make it go through the roof. Take it to infinity. For the fold eVects not only all materials, and thus becomes matter for expression in accordance with diVerent scales and speeds and vectors (the mountains and the waters, papers, fabrics, living tissues, the brain), but it also determines and brings form into being and into appearance, it makes of it a form of expression.7 Moving across all categories along an endlessly self-diVerentiated materiality, a support subtending the frames, molds, and systems that determine materiality, the fold pushes matter forth into shape and expression. It could be cast as the infinite process of drawing, of drawing forth the invisible (yet present) within the visible. 6. Gilles Deleuze, “The Fold,” trans. Jonathan Strauss, in Yale French Studies: Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/ Philosophy 80 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 227. 7. Ibid., 242.