If Paradise Is Half as Nice

For a short while a disused building becomes something else. Before it is emptied for good — or made new again — a group of artists move in, and the faded rooms fill with work made for exactly this place and no other: neon strung between cast-iron columns, a stone hung on a thread, glass panels lit from behind, a ceiling remade in white plaster.

If Paradise Is Half as Nice stays with the makers rather than the finished pieces — the hours on ladders, the waiting, the quiet before an opening. Peeling paint and broken tiles become the fourth wall of every portrait; the building’s slow decay and the work going up inside it belong to the same short season.

It is a picture of that in-between time, when a place is briefly held between one life and the next, and made — for a moment — into a kind of paradise.