Visitors to the Venice Biennale will probably get lost on their way to the Scottish outpost. The Palazzo Pisani is certainly not particularly easy to find. Normally this would be completely maddening. But in the case of Martin Boyce you can take it as part of the work. See your hapless wanderings as a piece of mental preparation.
No Reflections is a sort of postmodern maze that wanders through the world of an ancient palazzo with mouldings, marble and extravagant mantels.
This is the fourth time that Scotland has had an independent national presence at the Venice Biennale, the world’s most prestigious arts event. In the past it has always put on a group show. But, this year, the work of a single artist is in the spotlight.
Boyce — born in Hamilton in 1967 and one of a pioneering group of art graduates from a Glaswegian course in environmental art — makes the most of the space. He turns seven interconnected rooms on the second floor of a beautiful Renaissance palazzo into a single installation through which visitors can wander. Walking through No Reflections is like drifting through some strange geometrical garden. Stepping across huge concrete paving stones, scuffing through scattered wax paper leaves, finding warped wooden bird boxes and odd rhomboidal rubbish bins, the spectator feels a growing sense of displacement. Outside is the ancient city. You can lean out through the windows, hear the shriek of the swifts as they swoop for insects, gaze into the green murk of narrow canals, hear the tip-tap of tourists feet as they cross over bridges, the shouts of the boatmen as they echo across stone.
But inside you are in another world. This takes as its starting point four concrete trees created by Jo?l and Jan Martel for the famous 1925 Paris exhibition of the decorative arts. To the artist, these trees represented a union of nature art. Now, their geometric shapes become the template for his new installation. Every form that you see — from the chandeliers on the ceiling, to the alphabet on the walls — is derived from them. As you drift through the garden you wander deeper into a modernistic labyrinth.
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It is as if one landscape has blown through another, the artist suggests. And the two echo each other. The natural and the architectural, the classical and the contemporary, the romantic and the mathematical, the lyrical and the pragmatic all meet in this piece.
Is there any resolution? You can delve into the accompanying booklet and find out all sorts of interesting things. Boyce has been inspired, for instance, by the modernist architect Carlo Scarpa, whose contributions to the city of Venice involve a striking convergence of ancient and modern.
But in the end No Reflections remains a puzzle. Perhaps this is part of the point. It is intended, apparently, to create an aura of emptiness, to leave the visitor feeling displaced. But, for the most part, all but the most faithful aficionados of the conceptual will lose patience. It feels far more tempting to leave his sparse modern world and drift off again into Venice’s Renaissance labyrinth. Boyce’s installation may well look better when it moves on in a few months to Dundee Contemporary Arts. But, for now, it seems to fail by virtue of the very fact that he is showing in Venice.