The White Room, storytelling vacuum.

The White Room

With ' The White Room 'the artist (based in London) John Paul Bichard enjoys playing with the idea of a multi-level dimension in which they intersect and overlap urban space and digital surfaces. The work is constituted by a series of digital prints which represent the same photographs of environments taken from a manipulated version of the video game 'Max Payne 2'. Most of the alterations are produced by Bichard using the blood of the victims of the game to paint the surrounding environment. The effect that these changes give us is very similar to the vision of the scene of a crime, one of those terrible images which have become so familiar with the fiction. The only – albeit substantial – difference is the lack of players, the space is in fact inhabited only by objects – like a photograph of interior design. The 'real space', the rooms in which wanders the hero of this shooter intimate version are what capture the goal, but the intent is not to represent reality, the real space, but an altered version of that space, something that has never happened in the reality of the game and that is created by the author in order to pave the way for endless reinterpretations of that place. Looking at the pictures that make up 'The White Room' you want to rebuild in reverse, starting from the manipulated frame that is set before us, the events that have taken place at that point in space. We are faced with places in search of a narrative.