Visual Art Review: Graham Fagen, Scotland + Venice, Palazzo Fontana

Unlike the Scottish contribution in 2013, this is a solo show, and in a new, more visible, setting on the Grand Canal. That dominating music is that of Robert Burns' Slaves Lament, from 1792, which he wrote - if indeed he wrote it, there is some dispute - only six years after he nearly sailed to Jamaica to become, as the programme notes, a "slave overseer". What would Burns's status be now if he had left Scotland? To be lord and master of the exploited, the chained and enslaved? Very different, of course.

That question, or that dark counterfactual history, lingers around this officially "collateral" event - rather like the song of dislocation and sorrow that drifts and filters through every room and corridor of the Palazzo Fontana. It sings "Torn from that lovely shore, and must never see it more/And alas! I am weary, weary O!"

This palace, as a stage for Scotland, is a touch grander than previous years. The last two shows for Scotland + Venice - a coalition of Creative Scotland, chosen curators, the British Council and the National Galleries of Scotland - have been at Palazzo Pisani, a large and expansive space which provided room and light and two excellent shows, but did sometimes feel not as visible as previous venues.

The Palazzo Fontana, a previously entirely private family home on the Grand Canal, a walk from the Ca' d'Oro waterbus stop, has some quintessentially Venetia splendour - a terrazzo floor, splenetic Murano chandeliers, exquisite details of rope, lion heads and fine ironwork. It is, like many of these 400-year-old palaces, dark and imposing at its entrance. Perhaps to mark this, Fagen has set a illuminated sign high up the wall: Entra La Giardino/E dimentica la Guerra it says. Come into the garden, and forget about the war, it means.

Fagen has set his interior work in a cycle of four rooms on the first floor, beginning with the main hall where the stark, primeval bronze tree stands.

Ominous, hard and bare, the Rope Tree came to Fagen's mind when he pondered how to connect the large space between the room's two chandeliers. For an artist who has featured flowers and trees before in his work, perhaps a tree was a clear choice, but this one is vast and malignant. Its coir rope muscles fray at the tips of its limbs, one of which is coiled like a noose. For a show that ruminates and hovers around history - maritime, mercantile, colonial - the alive but hard and sterile tree seems speaks to the stark relentlessness of time, the roots of family and memory, and the presence of exploitation and empire today. One's mind moves to the trees used for lynching, or the trees used as instruments of torture in Goya's Disasters of War. The terrazzo floor on which the tree, manufactured by Powderhall Bronze in Edinburgh, is tilted in the fashion of many ancient Venetian buildings - by 30cm from one side to the other. This slope lends an element of visual and physical unease - as if you were trying to keep steady on a listing boat - as you move through it. On the polished floor, the shadow of the tree descends into the plane of reflected light.

The four rooms of the show are arranged in a rough circle. After you move past the Rope Tree, you enter a brighter, clearer space, Scheme for Lament, which features Fagen's work with something altogether smaller and more intimate - his teeth. Fagen feels the shape and order of his teeth with this tongue, and replicates what he finds there on paper. The drawings are a response to feeling, rather than looking. Around the jagged, disjoined teeth are images of faces, like revenants, splashed in Indian ink. Some are multi-cultured and explosive, others mordant and from some soupy nightmare.

But there is that closeness and personal detail too: Fagen's interest in the depiction of teeth was sparked by casts of George Washington's mouth, but also, Penelope Curtis suggests in the attendant guide, x-rays of his own children's teeth.

In the next, penultimate room, Scheme for Our Nature, Fagen has created skeletal metal sculptures adorned with clay, ceramics, and grinning face masks taken from the artist's own visage. The clay elements have been squeezed by the artists fingers and fired, and the faces look like horror-masks or even death masks. The squeezed moulds, the results of a clenched fist, hang in an almost festive fashion on the metal stands. Masks are high and low. It could resemble an occult altar, with trophies and heads adorning it.

The final room, with an open balcony overlooking the grand canal - letting in both light and sound - is the emotional heart of the show. The senses are expanded to include sound and its relation to space and image. Four screens show Ghetto Priest, and three members of the Scottish Ensemble, playing the Slave's Lament, expertly recorded and then produced by dub mastermind Adrian Sherwood.

Recorded in the recital room of Glasgow's City Halls, each instrument and player was taped individually (not as an ensemble), as was Ghetto Priest. The sound was then mixed by Sherwood in his studio in Ramsgate, Kent. Initially, Fagen says, Sherwood did not know what he meant when he asked for a "soundscape" to be created from the strings, scored by Sally Beamish, Priest's keening, gentle voice, and additional bass and effects. They clearly worked it out. Together they have created a beautiful sound. The song is distended, dis-connected and then re-assembled. Its emotional force, however, remains.

The edit of image and sound has been expertly done. The music is insistent and sad, and the combination of Beamish and reggae seems to these ears to have worked seamlessly. The images on the screens are pin-sharp. The presence of Ghetto Priest anchors both the video screens, arranged in a solemn row, and the song. Sherwood's subtle mix, which drops in and out, and is full of small musical details, is aided by canny speaker placement which allows the music to play both before you, to the side, and behind. At its most forceful the music feels like it is engulfing the room.

Overall this is a beguiling show that is strong, rich and involving. The chance to move to a more visible location has been taken, a venue that is reminiscent of that used by the first contemporary Scottish show in 2003, the Palazzo Giustinian-Lolin, which also looked over the Grand Canal, and for this show it works well. And Graham Fagen's work is haunting and, in the final room, in a mesmeric work where he has collaborated with so many other talents, manages to be both visceral and strikingly beautiful.

Graham Fagen's Scotland + Venice show is at the Palazzo Fontana