Tesseract at the Palazzo

The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line – it’s a fold. If an ant is walking along a string, the shortest way for him to get from one end to the other is to fold the string. In Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time, Mrs. Who uses her skirt and this insect analogy to demonstrate how to bypass the standard constraints of time. Venice, with its stratification of material history from disparate periods would seem a likely place to test the theory. An exhibition of painting and sculpture by a New York artist at this year’s Biennale makes one such attempt – albeit with a spider.