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Something like this might well pop into your mind as you step into Robert Hengeveld’s new installation – or perhaps anti-installation.  For what the young Toronto artist has contrived here is a deliberately evacuated space that looks like a place where something once was.

The floor is a collage of torn-up shards of linoleum and passages of other species of sub-flooring.  One wall gives evidence of having once supported a stove, which has now been unceremoniously yanked away, leaving a damaged gap like the crater let in your mouth when a molar is extracted.  Another wall betrays the fact of having once supported a sink and taps.  You get to reconstruct the room, forensically, from what is left.  But what is also left is a certain wild, abject beauty that derives from the room’s accumulated diminishings.  The place is, in fact, like one big walk-in painting or construction.  The colour (is this accidental, deliberate, merely residual?) is rich and robust.  Once you get used to the slightly perverse fact that you-re enjoying what’s left of a ruin, you start to notice one beautifully undamaged sky-blue wall, an innocent passage amidst the depletion all around.  Another wall is a rich plum-purple, freed now that all the fixtures are gone – into its new status as a painting.  Everything is a mess, yes, but there is a transient colour and shape everywhere in this neo-archaeological site.

Alright, I love painting and maybe I’m forcefully anesthetizing Hengeveld’s provocative site and doing it violence in the process.  But listen, he’s the one leaving behind the pretty pictures!