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In his pencil-like embrasure, the look-out and later the gunner realised long before the easel painter, the photographer or the filmmaker how necessary is a preliminary sizing-up ‘You can see hell much better through a narrow vent than if you could take it in with both eyes at once,’ wrote Barbey D’Aurevilly, evoking the sort of squint necessary in taking aim and firing — Paul Virilio [1]     I I first saw Rabih Mroué’s work exhibited in the final gallery of the 2015 group exhibition ‘Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the Collection’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York His piece The Fall of a Hair: Blow Ups (2012) was exhibited alongside an installation featuring Hito Steyerl’s video November (2004), and just outside the cavernous and minimalist installation Lament of the Images (2002) by Alfredo Jaar Mroué’s work consists of a row of seven identically sized colour inkjet prints, unframed and printed with even white borders, each over four feet tall Installed at the end of a long corridor, the works were hung by small silver clips in their upper corners against a sombre black wall, their bright borders radiating outward in the pallor of the lighting   Seen from the far end of the corridor, each image showed the discernible outline of an armed, presumptively male figure, their heads positioned in the upper third of the image, their torsos carrying down to the lower border of the frame in a fairly classical bust composition The colour of the images varied within a muted set of pastel hues Their shadows were flat and open, the tones relatively unsaturated, the sun-bleached highlights in each image nearly garish under the gallery’s spotlights They were affably textured scenes to take in from a distance – seemingly the issue of some taxonomical portrait study or other   But with each approaching step, the images shifted and warped: the exposed gloss surface of the inkjet prints picked up and refracted every incidental movement of a passing visitor, like distorted satellite reception interrupting the smoothness of a television image, even as the density of each central figure began to degrade, rather than resolve in greater and greater clarity To approach the images was to