The discrete door opens onto a derelict staircase with creaking timber treads, missing balusters and unfinished plaster walls, leading upwards to the first floor which is a space in transition; a mix of old and new with a plain concrete floor, strings of lights and timber joists overhead awaiting new plasterboard ceilings.  But where are the builders?  By the sounds of it they are working on the floors above.

If the walls of this old house at No 49 Greek Street, Soho, could speak what stories would they tell – prostitution and drugs probably and perhaps even robbery and murder, such has been the reputation of the street over the centuries?.  In the film “Villian”, the crime lord Vic Dakin played by Richard Burton recommends Greek Street as a location for prostitutes. ”Try the Manhattan Club in Greek Street… lot of…. girls there… for twenty quid they’ll do anything… enjoy yourself!

More recently in April 1965 the well-known night club “Les Cousins” opened in the basement – famous for its all night sessions and support of new musicians while the first floor was apparently the home of the Dionysus restaurant.

In this transitional space, where the warmth of the street disappears into the wall, giving it a distinct autumn chill, artist Neil Ayling has installed jagged fragments from a camera obscura he created in New York with images of the walls, ceiling and floorboards reflecting back on the space as a project for Frieze Week.

In another old building, not far away in the gallery space of the offices of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) Associates in Langley Street, Covent Garden, William Bradley’s “Black Paintings” is another project for Frieze Week where black is used a positive colour to interplay with the other brighter colours to reinforce the abstraction and enhance the tonal depth.  Perhaps it is not too fanciful to see a link back to the work of John Hoyland at the Newport Street Gallery.

Two projects from Berloni Gallery connected by architecture: one held in architects’ offices; the other reflecting architectural images back into the space in which it sits.