Impasse Hotel Syria is a recent black-and-white book by Danish photographer Krass Clement, working again in the close, observational mode that has defined his practice across decades. Clement is widely regarded for his ability to construct an extended, melancholy mood from a single, limited setting—a pub in rural Ireland (Drum, 1996), a city seen in passing visits (Dublin and Belfast, both with RRB Photobooks), a Moscow park, a borrowed room. Here he turns to the corridors, rooms and immediate surroundings of a particular hotel called Hotel Syria, photographing the spaces and the people he encounters there as a quiet, unobtrusive visitor, building his sequence around the brooding interplay of light, surface and gesture that has long characterised his work. As in his other Irish and European books, Clement works with a minimum of caption or apparatus, allowing the photographs to function as a flow of impressions: a hotel becomes, briefly, the whole world.