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At the centre of Issy Wood’s solo exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa is a room-within-a room The division of the gallery into two viewing spaces – the inner sanctum and a perimeter corridor – is an intelligent piece of exhibition design for an artist whose work challenges the boundaries separating inside from outside, private from public, self from other, object from image   The dreamlike, animistic and discomfiting tone of the exhibition is set by the three-metre-wide Study for a Tureen (all works 2017) This woozy impression of ornate silverware is rendered in smudges of cambric white and absinthe green, with an unsteady outline signifying either the compromised physical integrity of the object or the altered psychological state of the viewer By suggesting that these might be one and the same – that perception cannot be separated from reality – Wood plays on the dual status of painting as object and image, caught on the boundary between the world of things and the world of the imagination That this item of tableware came to assume a menacingly anthropomorphic aspect – its decorative belt suggesting bared maxillary teeth – showcases Wood’s ability to imbue inanimate objects with something, for want of a better word, like spirit   The tureen’s sudden strangeness is like the familiar word which, too often repeated, seems to float free of language This transformation requires intense attention to an isolated detail, so it follows that the most narrative of Wood’s large paintings, The Supervision, is the least convincing Its implication of an obscure personal symbolism – a man, a woman and a cabbage leaf orbiting a ringed planet – frustrates any attempt to engage with it More compelling is When You I Feel, a twin head-and-shoulders portrait of two figures with the ears and trunks of elephants Gazing into each others’ eyes, they seem shocked to recognise in the other a sentient being Yet the cartoonish elephants – and the problematically ‘othering’ Arabic-effect script on which they are ground – align this painting with the Surrealist tendency to equate the anti-rational unconscious with ‘exotic’ or ‘primitive’ systems of knowledge   A similar pattern to