Things in a Room (Untitled #8)

Manuel Franquelo’s photograph pushes the medium’s capacity for illusion to an astonishing degree, even as it harkens back to 19th-century trompe-l’oeil paintings and Old Master precedents. With astonishing verisimilitude, Things in a Room presents all the clues for a complex autobiography in the personal ephemera and casual residue of some 30 years of life in the studio: an old student ID card, a photograph of the artist as a child in the arms of his mother, newspaper clippings, postcards, and notebooks, along with coins and thread and banknotes, pills and toys and rosaries.