“The back of magic” is what writer Diana Evans calls that area of the theater behind the stage where, as she says, the black hat and the rabbit are stored. In the visual arts, it’s much the same. To peer behind the scenes of a presentation, addressing the techniques or ideology of the display itself, can have a disenchanting effect—can produce unveilings and enlightenment, exposing the tricks by which works of art present themselves and the mechanisms behind their stories. This show by João Penalva was devoted to uncovering this realm, yet hardly appeared intended to do any disenchanting at all. On the contrary: We found ourselves in the midst of a collection of fantastical items that have a quite bewildering effect. The series of “Display Stands,” 2010–11, for example, combines photographs of, yes, display stands with narratives written by Penalva himself. The empty stands appear monolithic in their own right, almost like steles or monuments from some distant no-man’s-land, and the texts serve to enhance this sense of obscure significance. The stories speak of the locations where the objects were found, their provenance and the history of their creation. But image and text are unrelated, their juxtaposition merely the product of the artist’s combinatory imagination. He directs our attention to the struts and supports propping up art while at the same time doing everything in his power to shroud its nature in mystery.

This mystificatory approach is taken even further in Monument, 2011, a two-slide projection that confronts a found photograph of an enlarger with a text about the photo’s possible origins. Three different photographers, Penalva gives us to understand in the short narrative he provides, might have pointed their cameras at this outlandish item, which looks like one of the Surrealists’ favorite objects. An outright travesty is then presented with Petit Verre (Small Glass), 2007, a cloth-covered box behind whose translucent “window” a fragile shadow puppet seems to be dancing; in reality, it is only a metal picture frame spinning to the accompaniment of a bizarre music-box tune.

Penalva gave the gallery a strangely backward-looking, temporally ambiguous atmosphere. The jingling mini-theater, the found photographs of Monument that date to the 1930s and 1950s, and the tinting of the walls in shades of beige and brown all conspired to make this meticulously hung show seem strangely salonlike and anachronistic. But though its “look” was not of our time, its thematic focus on the props underlying the display as well as on the unreliability of visual and textual information was utterly contemporary. It would be wrong to give in only to a nostalgic desire to describe the show as evincing a longing for the “good old days” of art. The nostalgia seemed rather to derive from the fact that in his reflections on display, Penalva keeps emphasizing the beauty of appearances, clothing conceptual notions in lavish words and costly materials. Though he allows us a glance behind the scenes, his goal is to obscure, not illuminate, the meaning of what we see there. Penalva pulls aside one curtain only to place another one on top.

—Astrid Mania

Translated from German by Oliver E. Dryfuss.