Welcome to Enrico Pinardi’s mystery theater. Collaborating on our set are painter Giorgio De Chirico and architect Aldo Rossi. Painter Giorgio Morandi has provided color consultation. Although lighting plays a major part in our production, the lighting designer has chosen to remain anonymous. The director is filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, whose work Pinardi alludes to. The only missing element is the cast, and that is where you come in. You were not invited here to sit and watch. You were invited here to live your life.

" We are close to waking when we dream that we are dreaming, " Novalis writes in Hymnen an die Nacht ( " Hymns to the Night " ), but " Silent Ceremonies " is more like a set of nightmares that there’s no waking from. Born in Cambridge in 1934, Enrico Pinardi was educated at the Rhode Island School of Design, Mass College of Art, the Boston Architectural School, and the Boston Museum School, and he spent most of his teaching career, from 1967 to 1995, at Rhode Island College. Many of his admirers know him better for his sculpture, but these new works — oil on canvas, oil on board, or pencil or charcoal — mark him as a major painter who’s entitled to be " collaborating " with the likes of Antonioni, Morandi, Rossi, and De Chirico.

" Silent Ceremonies " comprises 39 works whose elements Pinardi keeps reshuffling to pose new and ever more disturbing questions. The table — sometimes small and square, sometimes long and rectangular — is always covered with a cloth; it can suggest a dining table, or an altar, or a hospital gurney. The curtain is always pleated in the same stiff, regular way, like a room divider or a hospital curtain. The trapdoor isn’t quite like a theater trapdoor: instead of dropping down in two leaves, the door proper lifts up, like a dungeon lid, and it’s usually strung by what looks like a steel cord to the nearest wall, as if it were immeasurably weighty. The odd rectangular or conical solid or truncated hexagonal obelisk seems to stand in for the absent actor; pegs extending from the wall could be coat hooks waiting for us to shed our outer garments and take our place in Pinardi’s tableaux. On occasion the table is set with pieces of plywood; these extend the picture frame out toward us, as if inviting our participation, or our complicity. A flat, narrow housefront shape with an even narrower Aldo Rossi prison window looms from time to time. Redemption, such as it exists in Pinardi’s work, comes in the form of a rainbow that recurs in a narrow, pinched form that to me suggests the coiled form of Magritte’s tuba, digital (it’s reduced to primary colors) and joyless. The only hint of human form — stand-ins waiting for our arrival — is the occasional De Chirico–like mannequin that asks nasty questions about our humanity.

Then there’s Pinardi’s palette. Previous works have flaunted saturated reds and blues against a somber ground; here the artist, nightwalking, confines himself (we keep running into prison metaphors) to Italian shadow colors: ghost, gun metal, sienna, umber, terra cotta, deserted piazza, brick, blood orange, cappuccino foam. Green in any form is conspicuous by its absence. Pinardi’s pencil and charcoal works reduce light (and thus color) to a bare moon minimum of crepuscular grays; this isn’t the chiaroscuro palette of film noir, but it conveys the same angst. Perspective, that comforting reassurance of three-dimensional sanity, is likewise conspicuous by its absence: either the paintings are flat or Pinardi is intimating two or more vanishing points, none of which works out. And that brings us to our anonymous lighting designer. " Secret Ceremonies " " enjoys " a secret lighting design. There are shadows everywhere; the catch is that they don’t add up. Picture after picture bespeaks multiple sources of light. Who’s responsible? Is Pinardi’s anonymous designer some form of God? Whether we stand outside and look or enter and entrap ourselves within his frames, we’re left with no answer.

But Pinardi does pose essential questions. Martyrs puts the square table/altar front and center and crowns it with the housefront, here looking like the Ark of the Covenant. On the left we have the hospital curtain; what’s behind it we’ll never know. On the right three De Chirico forms are held upright by steel cords, as if to underline their lack of autonomy. La Notte (The Night), whose title can scarcely be ignorant of the 1961 Antonioni film, is bathed in bleak moonlight, its unsaturated palette ranging from a dusty mauve to a nondescript purplish black. The truncated hexagonal obelisk casts a short shadow, and behind it the housefront has set itself up in the recessed center, but the perspective — yes, there is one here — leads back to a small square at the right rear, what should be an Alice door opening into Wonderland, except there’s no indication it’s a door. Vanishing Point also " examines " perspective: from left to right we see the curtain, the obelisk, and the housefront, all without the slightest hint of depth. In front of the housefront stairs led off to the right — not into the house but into a totally different dimension, and indeed into nothingness, as if that were our human vanishing point.

God, or something like him, isn’t altogether absent. The focus of Locked in Silence is a rectangular table/altar; a small rectangular solid raises the usual doubts in an alcove left, and there’s a small black grate (for our ashes?) in an alcove right, with a coat hook top, but the attention getter is the two pieces of plywood on the table and the way they seem to form a cross. Another painting has the same table with what appears to be a roast (lamb?) on top; to the left a thin wall that’s supported by a steel cord extending outside the frame is topped by two meat hooks. Pinardi has titled this work Betrayal; the Last Supper associations are unavoidable. Hook places the title object on top of the table, with a perspective suggestion of a vanishing rectangle behind it; the implications for our humanity are not comforting.

Neither does Pinardi’s rainbow assure us that God’s in his Heaven. In Night of the Rainbow it sits on the table like the circular saw in The Perils of Pauline; beneath the table there’s a box whose content is a matter of speculation. In Moonglow, the rainbow tops the rectangular solid like the crown of an empty memorial. In Escape, it offers no escape, sitting pastel-pallid on the right; the left side of this work is occupied by a second radiator-like object that’s actually a cage, and by a wall with unreachable coat hooks above and a narrow trap space below. In Eclipse (the title of Antonioni’s 1963 film), the pallid rainbow is partially eclipsed by the curtain; beneath the coat hook a rectangular solid slides into (or out of) an opening. In The Birth of a Rainbow, a De Chirico mannequin watches impassively as the rainbow seems to spring from the floor of the picture frame; in Dream Time the mannequin presides over the rainbow’s disintegration.

It’s all epitomized by The Wall, which is illuminated by dungeon light. The narrow trapdoor opening looks more than ever like a grave. Behind it the housefront stands implacable, unenterable, its narrow window admitting and emitting almost nothing. The truncated obelisk suggests the truncation of human existence. And the wall, another thin partition, has its pair of unreachable coat hooks. It’s not an inviting prospect: we can’t enter the house, we can’t see behind the wall, we can’t take off our coats and take up residence, and the grave is constantly beckoning. It’s Pinardi’s stage; it’s also our life.