The door breaks space, prevents osmosis, imposes partitions: on one side, me and my home; on the other, everyone else, the world, the public, the political. 
—Georges Perec, Species of Spaces 

The doors Dámaxo Henao (b. Medellín, Colombia, 1995) paints remain shut. They lack locks and handles, any sign that would allow them to be opened, and this subtraction—which takes a moment to register—gradually instills in the viewer a strangeness difficult to pin down. Something is held at the center of each composition, something that makes the afternoon suspend itself. 

Walking down a street at the hour when the sun leans against the walls, passing in front of a house that is not one's own, and lingering to look at it with the suspicion that the façade says something about the life it conceals. The door breaks the space, raises the partition behind which what belongs to oneself begins, and in that gesture, it administers the border of the habitable, deciding what enters and what remains outside. Dámaxo's doors guard volumes no one will ever enter; keepers of an intimacy without flesh. 

The ornament of a façade, the vegetation peering over a wall,;the shadows falling across railings seem to lend each door its own character: they turn it into passerby, sentinel, hermit. But these bodies can be touched by only one visitor—light. And the painting records that encounter with the care of someone who has looked at the same block at the same hour many times over and has noticed what filters in through the edges. 

We exist in that waiting, standing in front of a house that is not ours.