In a 1997 exhibition at Steffany Martz’s former SoHo location, Francis Cape presented an entire wall of yellow-painted cupboards too shallow to be useful even if their hinged doors had included knobs or handles that would allow them to be pulled open. He revisited that basic conception in this recent show: cabinetry, function denied. But it’s more than that. The layering of sensation and meaning in this apparently simple work touches on perception of color, space and surface, as well as architectural systems, craftsmanship, installation, history, memory and place. Here there were four cabinets of different colors and forms. Two were placed against one wall, a single one was set against another wall, and the largest cabinet wrapped around a corner to claim two walls. Centered on each wall was a crisp scale drawing, plainly framed rendering that wall and its temporary features. It was all very orderly and conceptual, but the impact was sensory and perhaps even emotional. What I felt first was a ghost of history. The cupboards seemed evoked, drawn out of the walls by longing and remembrance but not fully come into existence. That they were unopenable reflected the natural unattainableness of recalled things. Second, I saw color in space. There were two greens and two tans, none of them currently fashionable hues. This, too, suggested a look into history: these are the colors you find under coats of paint on old woodwork and aged furnishings. These almost-institutional shades refer to sober places. I spent time thinking about the relationships between the colors and trying to name the differences. Third, I saw an architectural or linear orchestration. These pieces are austere and unadorned in a way that I’d associate with Shaker simplicity and grace. Their minimalism is one of terse and efficient human making, not economical machining. As they stood in the gallery where Sheetrock walls meet steel floor plates without baseboard or molding, they mediated gently, calling attention to proportions and borders and to the propriety of erectness. Only Cape’s milky dark-green sideboard (or radiator cover?), with a comparatively lascivious curve cut into its foot, violated rectilinear order. The painted perfection of the surfaces eschews incident. Loot at them long and your heartbeat slows. They are so serene that they seem to have floated in, and yet they were inalterably linked to the proportions of this physical space. Cape is a virtuoso of quiet, providing a refuge from the world outside the windows, alluding to an imagined, remembered or hoped-for world of peace and integrity rarely achieved. They drawings, even more reductive, hung at the centers of the walls like the still points of the turning world.