黑料不打烊

Alexandre Singh鈥檚 first major exhibition at Metro Pictures features the New York premiere of his short film The Appointment (2019, 19 min). Singh transforms the gallery into an abandoned cinema from an imagined dystopic future. With trompe l鈥檕eil wallpaper and flooring that is painstakingly hand-drawn, the exhibition includes sculpture and paintings that refer to the macabre vernacular of the film. The works further Singh鈥檚 ideas around narrative and storytelling, which he first began exploring in 2007 with his Faustian novella The Marque of the Third Stripe.

A darkly comic thriller, the film is a tale of doubling and mistaken identity that embraces the fantastical and supernatural qualities of Gothic literature, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Roald Dahl. The protagonist is Henry Salt, an enfant terrible of letters who we meet as he wakes from a nightmare and discovers a confounding entry in his diary: 鈥�12 o鈥檆lock at the restaurant La Folie.鈥� But who is Henry meeting? And why doesn鈥檛 he remember making this appointment? When no one appears at the scheduled time, Henry becomes obsessed with trying to uncover this person鈥檚 identity. Charging through a series of dreamlike encounters, he discovers that the truth is more disturbing than he could have imagined.

The five new bronze sculptures on view are cast from reworked film props Singh designed using found kitchen utensils. Like anthropological specimens from a post-apocalyptic world, these strange insect-like creatures sit frozen atop pedestals of detritus, piles of pasta, popcorn, and packing peanuts. Inspired by Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki鈥檚 characters, the black and white paintings in the exhibition are portraits of surrealist sculptures that seem to have come to life.