In The Secret the Polish artist Klimowski has produced bizarre and disturbing novel-without-words, an unsettling psychological mystery revealed in a sequence of 300 drawings and montages.
A young woman and her two children vanish from their city apartment late at night, leaving a distraught husband to follow a nightmarish trail of signs and images left by their abductors. There is something alarming and almost occult in the force at work in the background, dominated by a giant camera obscura. As in Klimowski's earlier work The Depository, the metamorphosis of daily reality into a dark and sinister other-word of human forms and mutant creatures is gripping.
The Secret takes Klimowski into ambitious new territory, and projects (as in a silent movie) very powerful images of urban neurosis, ambivslance and erotism.
