The game begins even outside the gallery, where a dirtied drawing casts a rabbit shadow. Mounting the stairs, the visitor encounters a TV screen showing a blurry eye. Next to it leans a sculpture made from a bowling ball and pool cue. These traces of play continue. A pair of trousers hangs abandoned as though a comic ran for it halfway through his stand-up routine. A mirror mosaic panel bear the signs of a party worthy of supermarket cake but no more.

This scene is austere, yet unashamedly playful. Marsalis plays tricks, but he gives them up willingly, too. One of his large oils starts embarrassed in the gamer’s POV only to become a luscious abstract landscape. Bowling balls turn into tripping hazards, and a too-easy-to-miss camera beams the art-lovers’ contorted faces to an advertising billboard.

Working with both all and with very little, Marsalis injects his props with life. His circus is in town, its acts are the infrastructure of contentment. A less practised surgeon would have killed the proverbial frog.