Francis Cape at Murray Guy

If architecture is, in origin, a defense against environmental uncertainties, Francis Cape's quasi-architectural recent work lives in the art world by taking monochrome painting as protective coloration. Ama, the most formidable piece in this exhibition, consists of two paneled walls that meet at a right angle and are painted a buoyant and vivid but slightly milky marine blue. The first impression is of a generic Minimalist solid embellished with architectural detailing and color. Among the works by gallery artists in the adjacent project room, Cape was represented by Fayerweather Fragment, a single freestanding wall painted an equally eccentric, and striking, creamy brick-orange. Once you go around to the back of either one, you see that each conceals incidents of human accommodation: a small bench, an adjacent shelf. Though made from standard milled lumber, with seemingly ready-to-use vernacular detailing, these nether sides are oddly intimate. Unpainted, they appear naked, even skinned. Associations are encouraged with reading nook and confessional, forms that occasion seclusion and secrecy. The sense of intrusion, on first encounter, is strong.

Two Pilasters and a Seat, on the other hand, hid in plain sight. A pair of shallow pilasters, painted a warm off-white, were installed on opposite sides of the room. Between them, they seemed to support a preexisting 24-foot-long white-painted beam. One pilaster had a small seat appended to its base. Such was the modesty of the whole arrangement that, on first glance, the piece was easily overlooked. Its camouflage was that of a white rabbit in winter, and, indeed, each pilaster was flanked by a small black-and-white photograph of a snow-covered field. Though not identical, the images felt roughly symmetrical; in fact, they show vistas that face each other as seen by a photographer standing at the field's center.

Determining the viewer's position with perfect tact but unyielding precision--it is a quietly aggressive kind of accommodation--is one characteristic of Cape's work. A thoroughgoing craftsperson (he was apprenticed to a woodcarver for five years), he is nonetheless something of a neo-Conceptualist prankster, his ekes bone-dry but satisfying. In Fayerweather Fragment, for instance, Cape has deposited a plastic film canister on a rear ledge. Such is the decorum of his work that the anomalous object is lard to accept as deliberately placed; several viewers alerted gallery staff to what seemed a previous visitor's absentminded offering. By contrast, Pilaster II is a self-evident mind game, though no less engaging. It involves a short, typed set of instructions for building a pilaster, a small set of construction drawings and a photograph of one built to the specified proportions (as per the instructions, which call for such documentation).

Thresholds of function and viability, even of visibility, seem to interest Cape greatly. So does divided attention and, as in Two Pilasters and a Seat, the kind of distracted response to architecture most famously described by Walter Benjamin. But other psychological impulses come into it as well: confession and stonewalling, Shaker-style transcendence and Minimalist materialism. Indeed, for work that is the very paragon of quiet diffidence, Cape's says a mouthful.

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