The White Room (About T. S. Eliot) 2006

Here we have Pedro Cabrita Reis’s “The White Room (About T. S. Eliot),” a room installation that has a lot to say about art’s relationship to space. The blank canvases are placeholders that focus your eye on the architecture, the lighting, the experience of your own body in space. It’s kind of like a stage set waiting for a play that never arrives. The walls are painted a dark shade of red, which is really intense and creates a kind of pressure. The floor is tiled with dark squares, and this all kind of emphasizes the whiteness of the canvases. They’re glowing. What is interesting to me, is how the frames surrounding the canvases are casting long shadows on the canvas surface, so they are never really white. They are always in process. Think about the colour, the space, your own reaction to it. It feels somehow unresolved, or maybe even unresolvable. This tension, this lack of closure, is something that Pedro Cabrita Reis shares with other process based artists, such as Robert Irwin, who is interested in spatial experience.