If the buzzer rings, will you open? Dangers are legion: scammers, Jehovah’s witnesses, traveling salesmen, black-eyed children, werewolves. Better to keep the door closed. Much can be inferred from the social response to buzzing at the door. I’ve lived through the transition from the most pedestrian of locks to an impressive surface-mounted deadbolt, and the corresponding protocols, from spontaneously opening the door, regardless of who’s there, to the fearful world of spy holes and intercoms––and yet nothing could have prepared me for the vault-door kind of thing I encountered in the Americas. Moving to East Berlin, on the other hand, was like traveling through time back to the days of social democracy, before widespread social paranoia and rampant inequality. Polish-born artist Dorota Jurczak’s characters also seem to belong to a gentler world, which, somewhat paradoxically, is also more somber than ours. In her paintings exhibited at Galeria Piktogram, two of the artist’s slender and demure figures ring the buzzer: Bzzz and Bzzz Bzzz (both 2013). No Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz, as that would seem a tad compulsive. Besides, no matter how much they rang, the door would never be opened: none of the remaining protagonists in Jurczak’s paintings and sculptures have any …