By shifting his usual modus operandi from creating artificially lit, staged and orchestrated versions of real situations, to capturing the crumbling artifice of Rome's Cinecitta Studios in all its brutal reality, Gregory Crewdson could not have picked a more appropriate analogy for the state of contemporary architecture.
Like the face of a grand dame of the theatre many years beyond her prime, the once regal and seemingly solid walls of this pseudo-Roman settlement are buckled, cracked, falling apart at the seams. What once seemed built to endure the worst that time could throw at it is revealed to be naught but a feeble veneer, a basic off-the-peg structure wrapped in a mere wallpaper-thin skin of architectural intent.
Shuttered windows look out from walls which no longer stand. Doorways reveal portals through both time as well as space, providing a threshold between levels of paving from ancient Rome and the gaffer taped scaffolding of more decent decades.
And as ever, the soft foliage of natures armory mocks these human intentions, poking through abutted walls to reveal the artifice of their character much like a child assistant brought onto a magician's stage finds a trap door and releases the white rabbit. For once again, it is nature who wins out, and the studio lot for all our sweat and toil, is once more returned to the same state as before we ever interfered.
Visually, it's as beautiful as it is challenging intellectually. If you can travel to Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin or the past to catch this exhibition, I would highly recommend that you do.
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