You enter, stage right, through an unfamiliar door straight into a storeroom. Corridors of shelves bear nameless bubble-wrapped objects, old doors of all sorts are propped against the walls. Oak fitted with barred grilles and ancient locks, reinforced metal, painted panels pierced with Stars of David: why are they here? As in life, so in art: you are immediately looking for clues.
The body parts of a building, perhaps, except that the winding warren points to an entire city. Italian lettering appears on a sack. Stencilled numbers hint at the Venetian ghetto. Red darkroom lights cast a fixed glow over it all, as if you were walking through a monochrome photograph. It feels like an image of reality and yet also the reality itself. A label on a swaddled armchair seems to allude to this cognitive mystery. Back Room, it reads – both an instruction to some notional handler, but also a pun on the place in which you find yourself, here and in the artist’s milieu.
