We can read photographs, we can distinguish a holiday snapshot from an advertising pitch, we can easily decipher most Photoshop tricks - we are in control of images. In my photographs I suspend this belief for a brief moment before the eye discovers it's been fooled by a simple trick of staging the photograph in front of a painted backdrop. All of a sudden the existence of a real space beyond the trompe l'oeil fiction of the photographed painting becomes critical. It's this space between the narrative of the painting and its anonymous surroundings where my images acquire their meanings. We are forced to deliberately accept the fiction, knowing that it would disappear if the photograph was cropped just few inches larger.