Michal Rovner - Panorama - Pace London

The multi-screen video works Rovner presents for this show manage to confound virtually every expectation one might bring to works in this medium. Eschewing any notion of narrative, displacing ideas of resolution, veracity and reproduction, the artist presents a suite of paradoxical abstractions born of the subsuming of figuration back into an infinite surface. The presence, in places, of rows of tiny figures, moving purposefully, but apparently pointlessly: as much texture in flux as detail, seems only to reinforce a deep sense of spacial and temporal suspension. These are profound meditations on the human condition and location. They are at once desolate and thrillingly beautiful, quietly overwhelming and glacially disengaged. Perhaps, were nature to gaze back at us, this is what it might see. There is something here which speaks to human folly and the hubris which places us always at the heart of our stories. Until June the 15th.