Alex Hartley at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh- Hartley is a ‘builderer’, meaning he climbs about on the surface of human-constructed objects. The photographs in this exhibition are of several main sorts. One records his buildering exploits, with the artist perched, clinging or splatted against various concrete, brick and stone surfaces, whilst others are photos of buildings where possible routes are mapped out with lines superimposed on the surface of the photos. Other work was of ‘stolen’ images of various private modernist homes (which Hartley later began clambering about on, in an attempt to get closer still to the buildings). He also creates sculptural pieces that include ;ife-size photos behind glass intended to create model spaces we have some voyeuristic access to, but into which we can never go.

This tension between our legitimate gaze and trespass is brought up time and again by Hartley in these pieces, and taken further in his buildering, which represents a particular form of creatively-motivated trespass. It is twofold: it involves his physical trespass on the property, and the wrongness of his encounter with the building in a way never intended by the architect. His body looks wrong, splatted against these surfaces. The architectonic framing of the modernist (and other) spaces he transgressses usually support the human being in a simple perspectival plane, not tilted at strange angles into crevices. The lines of ascent and traverse on other pieces represent the same thing- this time the line of looking for routes that deny the usual architectural progress through designated volumes.

Some photos involve a sort of collage of materials (wood, plastic) assembled in detailed form like architectural models, reading right into the photographic space, but projecting from it. The collage obscures any underlying image that might inform the object’s construction. They might represent things that are ‘really’ in the photo, or they might not.
(Hartley’s process of ‘imagining what might be there’ tells me there’s nothing beneath’) But the point is that it doesn’t matter. Our imposition on the real landscape being photographed is every bit as transitory and flawed as the constructions Hartley glues onto the photo’s flat surface. Hartley’s constrcted buildings are always either flawed or deserted, the titles implying some sort of hiding place or flight from the inevitable. I think this ties in with the ravages of weather and time that are depicted in various other works. Inevitably, buildings turn to ruins. Inevitably, the aesthetic and ideological concerns of our culture are deconstructed by our traversing them in a new way. Hartley’s art puts him in the position of an active participant in the ongoing conversation of what our built environment (and our representation of it, both in art and in language) means.