art text by CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN portrait by DAVID SALLE Normally, one wouldn’t expect to upturn the art world just by launching a line of sunglasses, but that’s just what the 28-year-old artist/entrepreneur Alex Israel did in 2010, with Freeway, his Los Angeles-based eyewear company. Israel named all but one of his eight unisex shades after a different Southern California freeway — for example: 1, Pacific Coast Highway; 10, Santa Monica Freeway; 405, San Diego Freeway. In doing so, he intentionally planted himself in his geographical hometown. “Sunglasses, their frames and lenses, symbolize LA,” he says. Given the ubiquity and utility of sunglasses in Los Angeles, their wearers may well forget that they’re looking through carefully designed, predetermined lenses that focus reality. The focusing of reality is also a theme that runs rampant through Israel’s artistic ethos. During the last decade he worked for Sotheby’s auction house and Hauser +…