At first glance, Schoerner’s photographs of Donald Judd’s Marfa appear perverse. The way they are framed and his edit suggest no place — warehouse is redolent of a ghost town somewhere in middle America, highland could be Los Angeles, the landscapes a place in the desert. But look deeper and they are a remarkable critique of a remarkable place and a remarkable artist.

Just as Judd was not prepared to define his work, neither will Schoerner deliver the kind of reportage you might expect from a visit to the Chinati Foundation. Not a single shot of the interior spaces, not a single shot of the art. But instead Schoerner, like Judd, has occupied the space in between. The space in between building and context; the space in between day and night where an eerie light exaggerates the ghostly, sparsely inhabited town; a space where the everyday and the ordinary take on astonishing meaning.

Like so many industrial spaces inhabited by artists, the Chinati buildings look as if ‘found’ — this is of course far from true. But like Schoerner’s images, they embody this paradox. The illusion is ‘just come across’ but the reality is highly controlled and manipulated — a tight, almost military, grip on aesthetics. Warehouse could be one of the gallery spaces but it is, in fact, a functioning warehouse made Juddesque through the selectivity of the clean up process and the use of Judd elephant grey paint. The highland building has been taken on by a design outfit, again carefully stripped back and painted the same elephant grey. What we are seeing through Schoerner’s photographs is a small, Texan town of just 2000 people, engaged in a new vernacular — a vernacular that is the legacy of Judd, the dissolve and merging of the aesthetic between art and space, utilitarian and red neck.

For Schoerner, perhaps the experience of the art in the space was underwhelming — why else would it not appear? Coosje van Bruggen has said of Marfa ‘nothing interferes between the work of art and the viewer’. Of course, this cannot be. At the very least, our emotional space filters the view and the experience but, at Marfa, it is refined and filtered through the Judd aesthetic — perhaps now too ubiquitous, a victim of the culture it has spawned. Schoerner adds the dimension of time to the filter, to reflect on the space around rather than the space inside, at a point that is neither day nor night.

Once Schoerner has stepped outside of the buildings, he steps into the space beyond into the vast open landscape of the mid-west. In airfield, at last, we see some work by Judd. But what I think Schoerner is really showing us is the huge impact Judd has had, way beyond his art, beyond even the creation of the Chinati Foundation. We see a landscape that you are compelled to view through Judd’s eyes, where drug blimp becomes a work in itself, whose resonance goes as far as the Mexican border (this is a site 50 miles from the Mexican border where radar blimps are used to prevent light aircraft being used for drug trafficking). And Marfa lights — that space in our minds where disbelief turns to belief and back again.