Alex Hartley’s eerie ode to Carlo Scarpa in Venice

‘I'm aware that it’s a triggering thing,’ Alex Hartley says, looking at the watermark that runs around the Victoria Miro Gallery in Venice. ‘I live next to a river and we flood every two or three years, so I know that it's a trauma; often the threat of it is worse than the reality.’ There’s an eerie sense of foreboding through the entire exhibition ‘Closer than Before’, which links the British artist’s new artworks with a site-specific installation, of which the tidemark is just the start. The space has borne the sign before, but it’s the first time it’s been applied by hand. Hartley hand-collected dirt from the lagoon to create a surreal echo of the past, or a warning of the future. ‘The beauty of the space put me off before,’ he says, ‘trying to rub a bit of something into it, to mess that up has been important… I like this idea that there's this threat that nature is taking back dominance.’

The gallery is transformed, the imaginary tide breaking through one white-washed wall to unearth a hidden history, linear concrete motifs and the curve of a circular entranceway set with dark glass. In Venice, where a 16th-century palazzo already lies behind the contemporary white cube of the gallery space, the pseudo-archaeological uncovering of modernist architecture set between them is incredibly convincing. ‘A lot of it was just about how you could build that illusion into 30cm,’ says Hartley, ‘trying to stop it being theatre and keep it real. It really is concrete. It’s not just dress theatre, so that was the battle of it. The details of the rubble went on last and quite often that last bit brings it alive, and makes you start to work your own narrative onto it.’

The installation was inspired by the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, in particular Tomba Brion (the Brion family cemetery, part of Wallpaper’s Carlo Scarpa Venice tour), which became a site of pilgrimage for Hartley during his residency: ‘I went over and over again, I couldn’t get over how it felt like a bizarre portal to another world.’ 

The energy of Scarpa’s work fascinated him: ‘When you spend time in those spaces, looking at architecture, I can nearly always understand how a decision has been made by the architect. With Scarpa, it feels completely right, but I can't work out the logic about how he came to it. His connection to maths and how that fits within nature is a bit beyond anyone else.’

Three artworks in marble present alternative portals, each transformed into a vivid theatre flat with a box-style inlay revealing photographs of Scarpa’s designs that have been layered and painted over. Excavation rather than creation becomes the focus, Hartley cutting the slabs with bolt cutters to create the illusion of the natural rugged edge of stone. ‘There was this misremembered Bjork song, “everything in the world has already been invented and it lives inside this mountain and it's just waiting to come out”, and for some reason that had been going around in my head while I was making, this idea that all this stuff is already there,’ Hartley says. ‘It’s embarrassing to talk about sci-fi, but I wanted some of that to come out of it, that it might be a link to another world.’ 

Curiosity is essential: ‘That question, “What's happened here?” is the thing that I like,’ he says. ‘I always hope I can surprise people and then drive people from one work to another to try and forge connections. I think that the most as an artist you can really ask for is that you cause people to stop, to question, to try and imagine.’

Alex Hartley: 'Closer Than Before', until 17 June 2023, Victoria Miro, Venice. victoria-miro.com