Martin Boyce A Passageway For The Sky, 2014

Installed just below eye level, Martin Boyce's A Passageway for the Sky initially recalls a window into a theatrical set or dark miniature parallel world. The work further emphasizes the allusion to a theatrical stage by creating inside the mantelpiece a set: on the right an opening is reminiscent of a stage door, on the upper right a round yellow shape recalls a schematic image of the sun. Its cast frame refers to the shapes of French sculptors Jan and Joel Martel's concrete trees, constructed for Robert Mallet-Stevens’s Pavilion of Transport at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris have been an important part of Martin Boyce’s formal vocabulary since 2005. The stark verticals and horizontals of the frame double as mantelpiece and a kind of proscenium arch, that, similar to its function in a theater where it creates a “window” around the scenery, appears to flank a stage. A Passageway for the Sky retains the ambivalence of its function: as fireplace associated with the security of home and hearth, as enigmatic theatrical set and, as the title reminds the viewer, as an opening to an imaginary world.