David Eastwood’s sixth solo exhibition of paintings at Robin Gibson Gallery is Ulterior/Interior, in which invented interiors resonate with history, atmosphere and metaphor. Eastwood creates insular pictorial spaces that conflate specificities of time and place while functioning as stage sets for drama: elements borrowed from Hitchcock and Kubrick contribute to the filmic quality of the work. Figures are rare in these works, but one will make a cameo from time to time, isolated and uneasy in his or her setting, subjugated by interior décor and inanimate forms that announce their presence insistently through colour, pattern and texture. In one painting a ghostly figure pulls down a blind over a window, the view through which is obscured by an oblique angle. Another painting features the legs of an armoured figure glimpsed from behind a curtain: a sentinel whose metal shell is lost in the soft fabric that conceals him.

Much of the work in the exhibition is informed by time spent travelling through Europe during 2008 and 2009, including a three-month residency at the Australia Council Studio in the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. In Paris’ museums such as the Musée Jacquemart-Andre and the reconstructed interiors housed in the Musée Carnavalet, Eastwood observed former private residences that are now on public display. Museum space is highly staged and access is often restricted and roped off. There is a sense of being on the outside looking in: distance and disconnection underscore the experience of the preserved cultural artefacts on display.

The strangeness brought about by the transfer of culture through time and space within a hermetic environment like the museum is a theme present within Eastwood’s work. One source he has drawn upon for this exhibition is Francis Bacon’s studio, characterized by a chaotic mass of detritus hoarded and stockpiled by Bacon and frozen in time since his death in 1992. The entire contents of the London studio have been preserved and transplanted into the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin with obsessive attention to detail, including the dirt swept up from the floor and transported in a box labelled “Bacon dust” . The objects, removed from their original context, take on a surreal quality, sealed behind glass and presented for public view. The space is reconstructed and presented as a faithful representation of the studio as it was in London, but it is of course a fabrication.

In Eastwood’s interpretation, Bacon’s studio detritus sits amongst an array of disparate artefacts, including objects from Eastwood’s own studio such as the familiar milk crate: a ubiquitous object appropriated as storage device and makeshift furniture item throughout humble domestic dwellings and artists’ studios across Australia. The angular geometry of the crate offsets the ornamentation and seemingly arbitrary assortment of crowded forms that jostle for attention elsewhere in the painting. Cumulative experience directs the choice of décor in these works. Disparate eras, styles and props remove these spaces from everyday reality, forming a continuum of historical and contemporary influences. Eastwood creates artificial and indeterminate spaces that are more theatrical than domestic, more psychological than functional.