Art review: Rachel Maclean - Spite Your Face

In Rachel Maclean’s new morality tale, “the only way out is up”. And the only way up is… not very pleasant. If there seemed a possibility that the 29 year-old artist, who trained at Edinburgh College of Art, might rein in her scabrous satire and dark humour for the prestigious setting of the Scottish presentation at the Venice Biennale then the good news is that unlike Pic, the urchin anti-hero of her retelling of the Pinocchio story, Maclean is singularly unwilling to compromise. Maclean’s new film, Spite Your Face, which will return to Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery in 2018, is a riot of gold and Renaissance blue, with an aesthetic that falls somewhere between Titian and Trump Tower. It is shown as a vast 8m high vertical projection in a deconsecrated church on a quiet canalside in the Cannaregio area of Venice.