3/5

AS SHE grew up in Rome, it is hardly surprising that the Glasgowbased artist Belinda Guidi finds herself drawn to the monumental.

But in a city cluttered with weathered stoneware, Guidi has chosen perhaps the biggest and ugliest lump of rock in the eternal city as the inspiration for her exhibition.

The Victor Emmanuel Monument is a giant piece of nineteenthcentury kitsch masquerading as classical architecture. It took more than 20 years to realise, and is better known as the wedding cake or the typewriter and as a domineering presence on the skyline, rather than its intended purpose as a symbol of Italian reunification. At the centre of the scheme is Enrico Chiaradia's equestrian monument of Victor Emmanuel II. In its attempt to invent historical continuity for a country that was fractured, the monument echoes one of the great Roman sculptures:

the second-century image of Marcus Aurelius on horseback.

Guidi is interested in how monuments can change or ref lect the city around them. Her beautiful revolving light structure Alphaville, seen at Glasgow's CCA, was a lowtech attempt to recreate the city of the future as imagined in Jean-Luc Godard's movie of the same name.

In Palace she examines the physical image of the horse and rider and the artistic balancing act necessary for large-scale public sculptures.

In a series of photographs, Cavalier, she shows modern women on real horses. One pair is recorded in the natural setting of the country;

another pair groomed and glowing in a paddock. In Guidi's images the reality of horseback riding is more mundane than the sculptural glory, with its mud spatters, sweat and awkward stances, yet there's an excitement visible too and a living horse is far more beautiful than its rendition in bronze.

Equestrian sculptures are notorious for their technical difficulty, the need to balance horizontal and vertical, the difficulty of vast bulk held up by four slender hooves. Guidi's three sculptures on show ref lect on the contradictions between monumentality and delicacy and a similar set of practical problems to those ancient equestrian difficulties using contemporary materials and forms.

A powder-coated steel construction, Ultramodern, is a slick cubic structure, made of 14 individual girders but balancing only on two lean horizontal legs.

Palace is a tall wire mesh cage, made from two identical semicircular units, with a sinister air suggesting a prison as much as a tower. L'Esprit Comique, is two slim triangles of white sheet steel, leaning tenuously against the wall, their surfaces punched through with patterns like paper cuts. In all three the solid metal is undermined, eroded or made light of, but the monumentality remains. None of these has the magic of Alphaville, Guidi's best work, but inspired by an architectural wedding cake, Palace is a committed exploration of density and confection.