You’ve got aesthetically pleasing colours as backdrops, like candyfloss pink, baby blue and mint green... ‘successful’ people in suits... sterile, airy spaces... delicious foods and beverages. Emerging from this everyday ordinariness, depicted in these razor-sharp settings that resemble modern fairy tales, is a camouflaged sense of eeriness that’s been domesticated, so as not to raise suspicion. Clemens Ascher’s trademark is to portray, in picturesque form, the monumental dimensions of the manipulation in which we live.

‘There are three types of lies’, said Mark Twain, ‘lies, damn lies and statistics’. Ascher is less interested in the perilous scale of lying that we’ve already become inured to, and more preoccupied with the methods through which we are duped. Or, as Ascher describes it, ‘people feeling free within a very limited spectrum of acceptable opinions and generated desires, for which to be satisfied they have to function with- in the system’. And, really, why else would flamingos be standing between concrete walls?