Ramón Masats Spanish, 17/03/1931–4/03/2024

A gallery of the Prado, empty. On the right-hand wall, in a heavy dark frame, Las Meninas, lit so that it glows out of a room that is otherwise almost dark. In front of it a rope hangs between two brass stanchions. On the left, a doorway with a pale curtain in it. A marble floor, veined and dull. Not one person anywhere.

It is a painting made entirely of people looking out at you. The infanta, her maids, the dog, the painter standing back from his canvas, the king and queen reflected in the mirror on the far wall: the whole apparatus is built to catch somebody standing exactly where you are standing. Masats photographed it at an hour when nobody was.

So the looking goes out and comes back with nothing. A rope keeps out visitors who are not there. A curtain hangs across a door nobody is coming through. The only thing in the room doing any work is the painting, which has been waiting three hundred years for somebody to walk in and has not been told the gallery is shut. Masats spent the sixties finding jokes like this inside Spanish institutions, and this is the driest of them.