Welsh is interested in what the fabric of a space reveals about its history. How porous is material to toxic ideology? Do architectural structures and fixtures retain historically invested symbolism, even after those who commissioned and designed them have perished? Can a building be evacuated of its original purpose entirely? Welsh’s recent work juxtaposes the deliberately imposing aesthetic of Portuguese fascist architecture with the apparent innocence and powerlessness of his child subjects.

It’s a clever alignment that asks us to reflect on the connection between human development and the architecture that surrounds us. The boy in Swans is wholly immersed in Da Silva’s design, which extends beyond the structure of the building itself to the furniture and fittings: the bank was a vast repository for pompous ornamentation and displays of ceremonial decadence. Situating the child in this hostile setting, the artist gestures towards how ideology infiltrates every surface, including the floor on which the boy’s small head rests.

Welsh’s work contains multitudes that, much like the buildings which fascinate him, do not reveal themselves immediately. In this sense, Welsh gently probes troublesome legacies of modernism and fascism to think about how their complicated remnants still operate today.

We’re far from discussing outmoded notions of photographic authenticity in this work because Welsh embraces the digital as an accomplice: he casts the children, laboriously pursues administrative permissions to photograph the interiors, contributes to the restoration of the space, captures the images on advanced high-specification digital cameras, and then meticulously manipulates them using software.

It seems too obvious to surmise that the young boys in these images represent the artist as a child. Still, there’s undoubtedly an element of Welsh contending with his inheritance – to reference the series title – as a Portuguese artist growing up in the wake of fascism. In another monumental work, Hearth, a naked little girl, with anachronistically coiffured 1960s-style hair, faces away from us towards a sweeping and heavily propagandised mural of historical Lisbon. Her overwrought and overly mature appearance of femininity, combined with her isolation within the composition, are reminiscent of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but the mural is altogether more jarring and the room she occupies too deliberately muted, the misguided sense of glory that birthed it having long since waned.

The exactitude that undergirds Welsh’s practice shouldn’t be mistaken for faithfulness to how things appear to the naked eye. Yes, he is heavily invested in knowing the ins and outs of a building, but he employs the material he garners to tell an opaquer, albeit clue-laden, narrative. Children, he implies, would never have been permitted into the kinds of adult spaces they occupy in these images. Not quite what they seem, his young subjects are catalysts for alternative realities and invitations to open interpretation.

The Red Jumper features the same boy that appears in Swans. Once again, he’s pictured on his side but this time he’s shown in close-up and, instead of lying on marble, he’s enveloped, womb-like, by the material of the titular garment. He nonchalantly prises his right eyelid open and jams his index finger above his eyeball while the rest of his face seems discordantly serene. Only his gleaming eye has no pupil. In fact, it’s completely white, like a snooker cue ball. Now, we’re in sheer Stanley Kubrick territory: what began as the strange yet plausible tale of a young boy recumbent on an austere office floor has revealed itself to be altogether more horrific.

- excerpts of the text The Inheritors, by Sean Burns. He is an artist, editor and writer. He is based in London.