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We’re all mad here… …so said the Cheshire Cat. Apply this equation to anything and whatever the decision – left or right / right or wrong / red or blue / truth or dare / win or lose / choice or change / either or – all roads lead to a conundrum. Madness prevails. One anecdote among many that seeks to explain the appearance of Lewis Carroll’s bewildered and outrageously outspoken heroine Alice in the drab greyness of late 1960s Soviet reality, where illogic was the rule of law, is that an official responsible for non-Soviet socialist literature stumbled upon a Bulgarian translation of the book. Thinking it was a Bulgarian original, he naturally ordered a Russian translation to be made. Like a vampire who first needs to be invited in, absurdism was catapulted into a world that was already functioning as a masquerade slowly coming apart at the seams. The merger of black and white into a uniform meh. An added layer of distortion mixed into the twilight zone of hyperreality. For his solo show at the appropriately anonymous sounding The Address, Vladislav Markov ushers in a similar feeling of tumbling down the rabbit hole, or at the very least, engaging in a one-way game of Russian roulette. Into this former bank building, characterised by a rationalist architectural style, the artist inserts a new series of paintings and sculptures. Victims of his trademark object and image manipulation undertaken using 3D scans and printing, these pieces are presented in a set of rooms unfurling to either side of a central gallery entrance, the décor setting the rhythm and acting as a trigger warning of childhood memories past. Except that now, the traditional entrance has been sealed off. A Sisyphean progression of transitional (transactional?) spaces unfurls, reached only through an adjoining door that connects the gallery rooms to the office. The proverbial rabbit hole: to reach the promise of paradise, one first has to go through its mundane bureaucracy. In this game, the loser takes all. If in his practice, Vladislav Markov habitually employs a variety of tactics to obstruct and decontextualise familiar objects and spaces, to render them just a bit more absurdly real and, dare I say it, prosaic, it is no wonder that The Address has been transformed into an obstacle course par excellence. Grey wall-to-wall carpeting, the type found in offices or nameless hotel rooms around the world, snakes its way through the five-room maze. Office chairs abound, their (not so) discrete objecthood now a prominent topographical feature that obstructs both movement and gaze, at the same time as they are an invitation. A McDonald’s playground for the world-weary. While Markov often digs around for images, forms and moods in the dark recesses of his post-Soviet memory palace, a space tinged with occasionally painful personal recollections and associations of an earlier life spent growing up in Magadan, a city in the most far-flung Eastern reaches of Russia, a site that even in the Russian imaginary maintains a special symbolic position, these are distilled into apparently objective and universal bytes. Taken as a whole, the paintings and sculptures could be siblings that have undergone a tortuous process of transformation, of being kicked around from physical to digital states, again, and again, and again, and… Objects that are tinged with history but that have been processed to the point of no return, reaching that moment when they become deliriously deluded and diluted. In the same way that a Sour Patch Strawberry resembles the real deal, Markov’s take on the readymade turns found objects into a wobbly shadow of their former selves. “One and two and three and four and five and six and seven and eight…” Similarly, the beat accompanying our attempt at a promenade is pronounced by a voice, mangled and stretched but persistent nonetheless, its enunciation the aural equivalent of Markov’s acrylic and pigment paintings. All but one of them are variations on what could be considered self-portraits, the “self” cocooned beneath protective layers of indeterminate black clothing and post-surgical face masks, masculinity served up wrapped in bandages, a dilated balloon ready to burst at any given moment. The counting reaches a crescendo, all the more so for the anti-climax, when it finally arrives, to hit hard. An iron barred door removes any hope of penetrating the last and final room, a searing white backlight accentuating the curves and angles of a single black shape. Redolent of some kind of auto part, the outline sharpens with time, and with it the pain of the phantom limb, all too real. Hey Siri, what are best painkillers for kids? Blood thinner, low-dose aspirin.