INTERFACE

REVIEW

Alex Hartley

Fruitmarket, Edinburgh
26 July – 21 October

Reviewed by: Rosie Lesso

When comparing the great mountains of the Scottish landscape with modern Scottish architecture, the former could represent freedom, the latter utility and restraint. In this exhibition Hartley questions this divide between the urban and rural Scottish landscape; remaining, as in previous work, critical of Modernist buildings. Acting like an outlaw, he regularly partakes in ‘buildering’ – climbing without a rope and without permission – in hazardous, unexpected places.

In 2001 he published the book LA Climbs: Alternative Uses for Architecture. LA is approached from the perspective of the rural climber, topographical lines exploring routes over the exteriors of buildings. Whether or not he actually climbed these routes is debatable, but he offers a fresh approach to this vain city. Similarly, in April 2007 Hartley scaled the almost flat exterior of the Fruitmarket; as evidence the exterior is currently covered in a photographic replication of itself containing maps of his routes.

Without photographs of Hartley on the building we must use our imagination here, yet the stern exterior is made accessible in a new and surprising way. A series of photographs inside the gallery further this response to Scottish buildings including Downfall. 6b. 83 ft. 88 Cardross, in which Hartley climbs the now dilapidated Brutalist building St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross. It is a stark and haunting image, Hartley impossibly wedged into a corner of a huge rusted tower under a grey Glasgow sky, the building a shadow of its former glory, hinting at the failure of Modernism. The sculpture Case Study also explores the inaccessible nature of Modernist buildings; it appears to be a building within the gallery, but the space inside it is not real but made from hazy photographs, and the building has only two walls with windows, behind them a huge slab of MDF.

Equally inaccessible and impossible are a series of relief buildings collaged on to photographs of rugged, wild wilderness. These unusual and surreal handmade buildings have a fragile, temporary feel, and we can only imagine who the reclusive inhabitants might be, like the treetop house in Deep in the Woods We’re Undiscovered. Hartley’s intentionally unrealistic and often terrifying uses for architecture draw attention to the wasted potential space around and should alter perceptions towards many buildings around us.

Writer detail:
Rosie Lesso is an artist and writer based in Edinburgh.

rhlesso@hotmail.com |

Venue detail:
Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market Street, Edinburgh EH1 1DF

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