It is supposed to be a specially post-modern problem that we are haunted by memories. Actually, any age is prone to nostalgia. Every age has made collections of objects and images to provide sanctuary. Every age has thought there must have been a Golden Age, whose day is done. These pieces explore some of these ideas, as they seemed relevant in the age of the Saatchi "Sensation" show.

Memory and death (1)
Ordering and worshipping objects (featuring Hirst and Cornell)

Memory and death (2)
Sacred objects (featuring Obidos, Hirst)

Memory and death (3)
The taste for Vanitas painting is alive and well (featuring Holbein)

Memory and death (4)
Accidents and installations (featuring Cornelia Parker and John Stathatos)

Memory and death (5)
A Levantine nostalgia (featuring Spiliopoulos)

Memory and death (1) (Top)
Ordering and worshipping objects. Featuring works by Cornell, Hirst

Written for The Independent, March 1998

Joseph Cornell made a name for himself half a century ago as a man who most mined his own rather limited life, but also mined his quite small world, New York and its suburbs, for shards of memory, scraps of equipment. A broken wine glass, a portion of electrical plug, a bit of a map: these were things made redundant by progress or abuse, which he treasured and presents to us because they trigger a reflection.

"Joseph Cornell's Vision of Spiritual Order"*, by Lindsay Blair, a committed Cornellite, shows how he turned them into something which was quite like art, but whose value to its audience was importantly to do with its being artless. He seemed to be saying that one might order oneself, and especially get to grips with the transcendental, by being careful about the contents of one's dustbin.

This is a sort of work which is very resonant just now. When Damien Hirst shows us his pharmacists' cupboards of mind-enhancing drugs he is casually reminding us to look carefully at the dreams - and the life-avoidance strategies - which lie within these clinical bits of furniture. The surprise arises because one doesn't usually look in a shop front or a clinic for visual clues about the big issues.

Hirst may seem heartless as well as artless: but the effect remains a substantial jolt. The device reminds us of 17th century still-lives, and especially those trompe l'oeils of letter boards to which are taped and pinned the lucky hands of cards, the tradesmen's bills, the scrawled notes in which our successes and failures and hopes and fears are also flagged up.

The effect is similar to Vanitas painting. It is seen in still lifes, whose power comes from the transforming force of close inspection of the ordinary. Nicholas Volley's work at the Browse and Darby** gallery relishes kitchen and pantry in a big-boned jolly sort of way which would only have slightly startled a 17th or 18th century still life painter.
The Albemarle Gallery*** next week opens a show of trompe l'oeil by Elena and Michel Gran, a French painting team who depict maps and playing cards and much other detritus of a cod-Medieval and early modern world, and though the joke of these recreated Vanitas works seems a little over done, and the painting a little sentimental, some of them hit the spot, as though a memory had been stirred by a sudden waft of perfume. The show will be followed on the same walls by glamorous, glowing paintings by the Bosnian, Mersad Berber, in which trompe l'oeils of collages make visual puns, again to perhaps overheated effect, but to effect nonetheless.

Cornell concentrated on objects rather than painting, but the point is the same. He produced "dossiers" which were accumulations of files, a bit like a child's scrapbook in purpose. And then there were his "boxes", which are most like art because they have a front and a frame. The found objects within make us wonder what they meant to the artist. And the supposition is that Cornell had a half subversive thought that he might force us to consider what such things mean to us, never minding why he lighted on them.
There is something in the air now which makes such work doubly powerful. We know well enough that scrapbooks and collage and decoupage have been the nearly-artistic activity of ordinary people for generations. Our window ledges and office desks have always been littered with objects which aquire a talismanic quality, and whose arrangement and rearrangement is done with fetishistic care.

Nabokov wrote about the psychotic end of this sort of obsessiveness, an exquisite over-refinement of feeling and self-awareness which shades into depravity. Lindsay Blair's account of Cornell makes one think he might well have been a pill or three short of a happy bunny. Like the Surrealists he admired, he was infused with ideas about exploring the subconscious. The idea of a freefall through associations mattered. He held himself together by making little altars of the humdrum, small sacraments of preservation. Mental chaos was soothed by listing and assembling things and ideas, by making a taxonomy of litter.
But even those who think of themselves as robustly well or normal can be touched by this stuff. There is now a quite strong - often suspect - revolt against the Modern, and perhaps against the western. It takes many forms, but it is clearly seen in our admiration of images such as those in The Art of Holy Russia at the Royal Academy****. These must be the most artistically intelligent, various and stylish of any collection of icons, and yet they remain - by the highest Western standards - inadequate technically, tending to the monotonous, and excessively stylised. They move us, though, partly because they remind us of a tradition in which not artfulness, but seriousness of purpose, is admired. Icons are intended for worship not scrutiny, for adoration not criticism. That wrong-foots us: it's our absence of prayer, not the painter's absence of genius, which we must address.

That's true of this entire genre: Hirst or Cornell are admired only for what they choose to show us, and the effect they create in us, not particularly for their arrangement or depiction. They join the icon painter in conveying a message and invoking a response. If any of them were more intellectually or technically accomplished - or it showed - they might be less effective.

It is tempting to see much of this tendency as dim-witted, or cowardly. But there is something solid, too, in our nostalgic for an age of faith, but also for an age which had the luxury of leaving old things around. There are physical as well as religious or cultural traditions we fear we should not have junked. Sometimes, we simply recreate them, nervously. Prince Charles' Poundbury***** is a rather good architectural ensemble. If his architectural dossier, his collage, is a bit comical, isn't it better than hammerhead cul-de-sacs?

So many of us now, thank goodness, have new things around us that we are bound to place a premium on the aura and the patina which only long use confers on the old. Country Living has just published a guide to Architectural Salvage centres called "Reclaim and Restore"******. It lists Bailey's, a household fittings store at Ross-on-Wye, outside which there's an old bicycle, rotting in a camp and disingenuous way amongst the wrought iron features on sale. This is salesmanship of a high order. The place sells many new things, but they are presented in the manner of an architectural salvage depot. The baths, the tables, mantles are designed to go into the kind of houses in which expensive kitchen units come ready "distressed". The window of L'Occitane, the soap shop in Regent's Street, and the products within, are designed to evoke an age of "proper" ironmongers, of enamel and wood, to recall memories of carbolic whilst erasing the chilblains.

All this is as easy to send up as Andy Goldsworthy sheep-fold, which is no more than dry stone walling with attitude. Often enough, nostalgia is merely cowardly, "spirituality" merely self-serving, the artless merely a con. But it's hard not to admit the force of much of this iconographic material. Our civilisation has always played around with these themes. But it has seldom made such a fabulous assault on the familiar. A reaction was inevitable.

*Reaktion Books, 20 April, £14.95
** 19 Cork Street, London W1, until April 9
***49 Albemarle Street, London W1: Gran 2 April-25 April; Berber, 30 April-23 May
**** Until 14 June
***** A few of the first tranche of houses remain: C G Fry and Sons, 01305 257267
****** in association with SALVO, 01890 820333

Memory and death (2) (Top)
Sacred objects (Featuring work by Obidos, Hirst)

Written for the Independent, 1997

In October 1997, the Independent published this piece on the "Sacred and Profane" exhibition of paintings by a 17th century woman. It showed that the divine could once be found in the most humdrum and even painful subjects.

A trussed lamb makes an odd devotional image. There it lies, feet bound, caught in indignity and perhaps pain. It wears a look - if a young sheep's look can be interpreted accurately - of mute appeal. At best, it's a baleful look. If this were the twentieth century, such an image would most likely be seen, grainily photographed, in a newspaper advertisement for the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals. It is, in a way, more shocking than anything essayed by Damien Hirst. This is a living creature portrayed not as a carcase on its way to be meat, but as the living embodiment of joyful spring on its way to slaughter.

Josefa of Obidos, rare in being a woman painter in early 17th century Portugal, was portraying an Agnus Dei - the lamb of god - and the creature, perhaps two or three months old, is hog-tied, ready for the knife on its stone slab, an altar with no cloth in sight.

The peculiarity of the thing is not merely that we are startled to see an animal's suffering transformed into an object of religious devotion, but that anything quite so commonplace could be thought likely to reward long reflection. So it is quite right that the show of Josefa's paintings, recently seen in Washington and now at the European Academy and the Accademia Italiana*, is called "The Sacred and the Profane". The best of the paintings are still lifes, a kind of work which was quite new then. Its subjects were often routine to the point of banality. But the most humdrum of the scenes is capable of producing something like awe.

Josefa's work was part of a growing trend. Gabriele Finaldi, the curator of late Italian and Spanish painting at the National Gallery (and of the 1995 Spanish Still Life show there), says, "Still life painting happened all over Europe from the end of the 16th century. Perhaps it arises partly because the technical accomplishment is in place: people could paint light falling through glass, and so on. And then, people were reading in Pliny about classical still life paintings which we no longer have. People in the 17th century were interested in illusion: they were interested in the idea of paintings of grapes which fooled birds into pecking the picture, as they had read about in the classics."

But there is something in the religious and intellectual temper of the time, too, which could use the new still life style. According to Finaldi: "These developments go with advances in the worlds of science and observation. Catholic countries had rather done down the senses as negative and dirty - and were perhaps rethinking that." A still life of an object, however familiar, lets the viewer consider more deeply the metaphysical meaning which lurk behind the tangible world. In our own time, soup tins and dead animals have done this work.

For Spanish and Portugese, more even than anywhere else in Europe, metaphysics came drenched in religion. Josefa, at least in youth, was a sort of part-time nun. As a painter living in a small provincial city in a country which itself was provincial (at least compared with Spain), she was heavily derivative of more accomplished Spanish painters. The trussed lamb is an example: the far more celebrated Francisco de Zurbaran [[[accent on the last 'a']]] painted several twenty or thirty years earlier. She depended on commissions from religious and monastic orders, and thus worked within strict and pious conventions. But whilst she often worked from the engravings of better painters, she was also very Portugese and original in the almost peasant cheerfulness which usually eluded the masters of the austere, sunbaked plateaux to her country's east.

She puts homely details into her versions of famous images of the holy family. And when she comes to do still lifes of bigger collections of food, fruit and flowers, she showers the whole scene in petals, berries, and twigs, with a fine and joyous disregard of perspective or order.

Angela Delaforce, the curator of Josefa's show, had a Portugese childhood herself, and remembers eating in a house whose table was supplied with cakes from a local convent. "The nuns were famous for making these cakes and sweet things", she says. Josefa paints them very often and not so much well as with infectious excitement. It's tempting to see them as something like blessed bread. But Dr Delaforce doesn't approve of reading too much into the paintings. The 17th century mind adored symbolism and hidden messages, which has provided American academics especially with the excuse to read a narrative into every petal and crumb of still lifes or any other old painting. In one famous case, a bunch of parsnips became, in one critic's imagination at least, the nails of Christ's crucifixion. "I'm not the kind of art historian who likes to read into painting more than the evidence will allow" says Dr Delaforce, severely. But she stresses that objects in still lifes do "acquire a sort of mystery" because of the way we concentrate on these illusions of reality.

Whether the nuns thought much more of the cakes than that they were a source of revenue, or Josefa painted them because they were spiritually as well as actually and visually appetising, cakes made in convents certainly did figure at Christmas and Easter tables. A religious mind would have noted that the bible is stuffed with references to food of every sort. The snail and the butterfly which figure in one of Josefa's paintings may indeed be there as symbols of humility and transcendence, as the American catalogue for the show has it.

The rest of Josefa's still lifes may or may not have been devotional, but her Agnus Dei very probably was. The lamb powerfully speaks of sacrifice. It links the followers of the New Testament with the older beliefs of Judaism and beyond that with pre-historic practices. Abraham trussed his son Isaac and laid him on a makeshift altar before God accepted that his faith had been tested thoroughly. It was to Moses the shepherd that God outlined how the Passover sacrifice of lambs should be undertaken. Christ as a youngster is foretold as "the lamb of God which beareth away the sins of the world". Josefa's customers, less squeamish and more pious than anyone today, also lived far tougher physical lives than most of us now. What would the brief and probably slight suffering of the lamb matter if it served so grand a purpose as to further the work of the church in saving souls? And if the animal's suffering was matched by human empathy, then was it not well vindicated?

The show ran at the European Academy and Accademia Italiana, 8 Grosvenor Place, London SW1

Memory and death (3) (Top)
The taste for Vanitas painting is alive and well. Featuring Holbein

Written for The Independent, December 1998

You'd think it was Easter approaching, not Christmas. Away from the shopping and the Yves St Laurent lights, London is awash with images of death and the vanity of human life. It's as though the capital was host to one huge exhibition, scattered over most of its galleries. We have a severe case of de rigeur mortis, but it is more likely that the explanation lies more in the enduring power of the theme than zeitgeist or any other syncronicity.

Thomas More wrote somewhere that a day is wasted in which there has been no serious remembrance of death. Contemplating death informs the way live our lives in rather the way that a fullstop reverse-engineers meaning into the half-formed order of the words which precede it. Vanitas painting - work which dwells on the vanity of human desires - has a long history in still-lifes, in portraiture and in allegorical work.

So it is wrong to see death, and the discipline it imposes on life, as only mattering to people who have the horror of hell hanging over their heads. And it would probably be wrong to look at the anamorphic skull in the dazzling double portrait of The Ambassadors at the National Gallery as merely a typical medieval image. Do the two men have it there, conveniently compressed, so as to make a tactful gesture to convention and the deity? Lots of piety is not much more than an insurance policy. It happens that at least one of the Ambassadors seems to have been deeply religious and in any case the skulls and its inimation of moratlity is given a central role in the drama of the painting. Surely the anamorphosis has been precsiecly designed to say that life is lived with death as a major factor whose reality we suppress, but which is occasionally and usefully glimpsed in its real perspective?

Nor is remembrance of mortality necessarily morbid, especially for the religious. Susan Foister, one of the curators of the show, point out: "the skull is there to remind one of mortality, but the cross is there, too, and it is best seen from the same position that restores the skull to normality. So beyond mortality, there is eternity".

The Ambassadors, with their exquisite scientific and astronomical instruments alongside the Cross, are spiritually humanist but religious, and their understanding of the world is similarly on the cusp between the classical and the modern. At the Royal College of Art, The Quick and the Dead show seems at first, flinching, glance to be mostly about a post-religious Renaissance and modern curiosity about the aesthetics and mechanics of the human body as a strictly biological entity. These flayed bodies ("ecorche") are not painted as martyrs but specimens. There's a moral point here, of course: namely, contemplating the flesh one is and the meat one will become holds a fascination which is instructive spiritually as well as medically. And it's worth noting that scientificity does not by itself dent piety.

More to our point: the dissecting table was often protrayed, as were the victims of dissection, in a Vanitas context. In this show, Agostino Veneziano's Allegory of Death and Fame (1518), a danse macabre depicting late arrivals at the pathologist's ball, makes the point. And showing that the point was felt across the centuries, there is Hogarth's "Reward for Cruelty", a mid Eighteenth century account of a dissection which draws on the fact that criminals paid their debt to society on the dissection table. Their entrails become food for passing dogs, a recurring theme.

The tradition remains intact in the nineteenth century. G F Watts has a classical funeral bier, with a shrouded figure and the cast-off armour and glitter of a busy worldly life, in his "Sic Transit..." in the Symbolism in Britain show at the Tate. By now the vanities of the world can be seen in a socialist light, but the message written on to the painting ("What I spent, I had; What I saved, I lost; What I gave, I have") is borrowed from a Fifteenth century tomb and speaks to the Victorian idealist's hunt for medieval spirituality.

The Symbolist show reminds us that however hard we devote ourselves to sex and shopping, sex and death haunt us really. Sir Joseph Noel Paton's erotic sprite in "The pursuit of pleasure: A vision of human life" in the Victorian Fairy Painting at the Royal Academy, gives us further clear evidence that the Nineteenth century was as interested as ever in the wages of sin and, more troubling still, the vanity of human aspirations this side of the veil. But it even more clearly shows a people about to name the subconscious, and begin the continuing process of hanging as much blame on it as possible.

The fairy paintings, many of them lovely, are arguably about allegory taken to the point of evasion. The Sensation show next door is arguably about confrontation taken to the point of risibility.

It's not that the modern young painters aren't looking at the same subjects as all the other shows in London. The Quick and the Dead show, indeed, shows work both old and new which would fit perfectly well in Saatchi's collection. Amongst all the gore in Kensington, there is for instance, an Eighteenth century "Anatomical Virgin and Child", with both figures ripped open to display their insides, which bear irrestistable comparison with Jake and Dinos Chapman's Great Deeds Against the Dead.

Memory and death (4) (Top)
Accidents and installations. Featuring Cornelia Parker and John Stathatos.

Written for the Independent, May 1998

The world and his wife turned out on a balmy evening last week to toast the opening of Cornelia Parker's show at the Serpentine Gallery. Here was a white wall with a suit with holes in it: "Suit Shot by Pearl necklace" (1995). Here, a couple of stumps: "Sculpture Made By Elephants" (1998). Here - in a sort of orangery, or conservatory - masses of silver objects (crushed, in fact, by a steam roller) were hung from wires ("Thirty Pieces of Silver" (1988). They hung a foot or so above the floor, and were arranged, roughly, in circles: it was Busby Berkely wrought in table-settings.

Granted the unease one feels about much of the "Sensation Generation", or even the Serpentine's previous show, devoted to Piero Manzoni, Cornelia Parker's installations certainly do not seem designed to frighten the horses just for the fun of seeing the bourgeoisie in a state of shock. In fact, they are quite charming even though they come with attitude. They make edgy jokes. There is indeed some point to staring at a collection of objects (rolled Times, deck of cards, etc) which have it in common that they were incised by the guillotine blade which lopped Marie Antonoinette's head off. It made a sort of jump-cut: the poor lady's neck was the unseen guest in the case.

But it is much harder to see why one should look at materials which were at some point the backs of paintings by J M W Turner. One stands reverentially in front of them for a while and then one says, "Well, hang on. Yup. These really are just the backs of some old paintings." And one risks slipping from amiable expectation right through to a sense of being conned. It's an effort to haul back to a midway position which accepts that this piece doesn't seem to come off, but might have. One does, in fact, become rather more guarded. One doesn't want to be gulled.

The reluctance to take the Turner backs seriously springs from a serious anxiety about this sort of installation. Stripped down, "Art" is whatever we're prepared to stand in front of and in which we find some meaning. This punter adds a requirement: that the artist does some particular service. It's best when the service is really creative. But it can consist merely of intelligence and wit. This often consists, as it did with Ms Parker's near-namesake, the American, Joseph Cornell, in making a startling offer, and especially in putting objects into interesting juxtaposition. Parker's rescued fire-damaged Bible ("The Temple of Dagon is Destroyed", 1997) does this work. It is - coincidentally, according to the artist - open at an illustration of people running from an act of destruction. We can't see that, but we can see the scorch marks of a real burning, and the people seem to be running from those.

But some creative acts and conceits of juxtaposition just don't seem to get us anywhere. A blazing firework ("Meteorite Lands in Epping Forest", 1996) leaves us in the dark. "Another Matter" (1994) is just another pile of chopped wood (and one splintered coffin in the background hardly makes a summer). Assorted hankies wiped against various objects (for instance, "Tarnish from Charles Dickens' Knife, 1998), really don't take human civilisation on very far.

The potential seriousness and value of this sort of enterprise is not in doubt. Happenstance, violence, synchrony, coincidence, neglect - all these do, as Parker sees, make existing, found, objects interesting. They can all be put to work to create objects which acquire a patina as the artist manipulates them.

And even if many of these things seem wearisomely contrived, some of them pack a real punch. One stands in front of "Matter and What It Means" (1989), and as the figures made from suspended, flattened coins move gently to a breath of air, it is as though armoured statues on a medieval tomb shifted in their long sleep. That was touching.

Wigmore Fine Art has work by John Stathatos, a Greek who has lived in Britain since 1969. Independent readers will see (in the Saturday Magazine on May 23) work by Greek photographers from a show he curated. But now they can see his own The Book of Lost Cities. The show is built on ten photographs of big, muscular, sand-blasted landscapes from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Displayed on a light box, each bears evidence of a classical city, overcome, engulfed. To the left of each, there is a text which purports to recount a traveller's or a scholar's account of visiting the city at some point in its history. To the right, there is a map purporting to give its location. Stathatos doesn't say which, but in eight of the sets, there is a vague semblance to truthfulness about the text and map and their connection with the image. In one, the whole set is absolutely true, and in another, absolutely false. The artist, quizzed on the matter, says that the cities referred to mostly seemed to have existed, but that references to them in Roman, Greek or Arab histories are tenuous or dubious.

The result is wonderfully playful. It sends up academic erudition, but with great affection. The narrations seem very comforting and familiar. One gets whisps of Josephine Tey (as in her thriller, the "Sands of Time", set in Persia); there is a hint of Hakluyt, a bit of Kipling's The Man Who Would be King, the ghost of Rider Haggard wanders through. Stathatos himself recalls that he found resonances in Jan Morris' "Last Letters From Hav": "It's a traveller's book, purporting to be the record of a visit to an independent city of that name, somewhere on the Black Sea coast - somewhere east of Trebizond". The tone of voice of much of it, and the curious fit between fantasy, history, and deadpan images, reminds one of Patrick Keiller's London and Robinson In Space.

The Stathatos and the Parker shows are about accident and about looking, a little blankly, at the results of damage. But the Stathatos material aims less high than the Parker and reaches its goal better. It is really quite modest, but very clever. It is moving because it touches the perennial interest in the waxing and waning of great civilisations.

Cornelia Parker, 12 May-14 June, The Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2

John Stathatos, The Book of Lost Cities, Wigmore Fine Art, 104 Wigmore Street, London, W1

This didn't quite make it to the pages of the Independent in January 1998

Death and memory (5) (Top)
A Levantine nostalgia. Featuring Spiliopoulos.

In his glowing, radiant paintings and installations at the Wigmore Fine Art gallery, the Greek artist, Marios Spiliopoulos, has produced work which reminds one how potent Greek religious orthodoxy is. It always thought itself more authentic, not least because more eastern, in its style than its Roman near-neighbour. And then there is the potency of Greek nationalism, especially strong in Spiliopoulos' homeland, Thessalonika, where the Greek world meets its eastern and northern neighbours.

The artist's inspiration and themes are to do with heritage (especially national heritage), with hermitages and with honey. Thessalonika is, after all, where one of the three peninsulas of Chalkidiki is entirely given over to monastic houses, and where the hills of Macedonia hum with bees. His works are new-wave Athonite pleasures which complement those ancient treasures the monks of Chalkidiki last year allowed to be shifted to the region's capital and to be seen by women for the first time in their hundreds of years of existence.

So Spiliopoulos has a cottage (about doll's house size) whose chimney emits a sinuous maypole-type of thing of pale wood instead of smoke. The pole is wrapped in spiral ribbons of blue, the whole effect being topped at just below ceiling height with a cross. It's decorative enough to merit a place in a chic sitting-room (and almost cheap enough at œ1000). But it is also serious enough to be called art. The blue on the wood speak of preoccupation with Greece's national flag, and the cross of his interest in religion.

The show is called Memory's Fort (the artist has an iconostasis, or screen, of illuminated panels of that name) and the title reminds us of a curious, strong urge in some modern art: the desire to produce an iconography of identity, and especially one which reconsiders what has made us and brings comfort to us. This nostalgia can be kitsch, or maudlin, but at its best it seems to reach back beyond the hep scepticism of our times.

In Spiliopoulos, the enterprise includes recalling visits he made to the monks of Athos and in particular the hermit Tychonas, in whose honour he has an installation which is a shelf with a shaving mirror, a bodged-up water jug and a bar of soap (not a commodity one associates with hermits, but there you are). With a photograph of the hermit beneath it, that's all there is to "Tyhon 1997", but it evokes well enough the idea of living simply, the better to concentrate. In "N G Pentzikis", words by the aponymous author are etched on an old table which stands in a tank of shallow water in which float leaves and other detritus. A drawer stands open, itself half-full of water. Sprigs resembling trees, and crosses, stand planted on the surface of the table, which begins to look like a cemetery - or is it a fledgeling wood? The text looks nice, and the piece carries some sort of meaning even without a translation. I fancy the work is talking about abandonment and neglect, and about the spiritual re-awakening that flourishes in bleak surroundings. The scruffy old table is the "wilderness within" that is surprisingly fertile.

A bit like Tom Phillips, Spiliopoulos likes to tell to himself and us a sort of autobiography in images, and likes the effect of words, both as visual objects and carriers of meaning. The Greek has a wall on which are written (blue on white), in a stream of consciousness fashion, words which resonate for him, and they are punctuated with small ordinary objects, rather as a children's book might be illustrated. You have the feeling that anyone could do such a piece, and then that it would be a good idea if one did, and then that actually the execution is too confident to be commonplace.

Bewitchingly and deceptively there are also mixed media paintings in which blues, whites and golds - and candles and honeycombs - are used to make homages to Greek religious and national identity. The idea that such things can be celebrated comes oddly to Brits. Our British flag has become a joke or an embarrassment. Only the flag of St George retains some of the innocence of, say, the Danish flag. There is actually quite a lot in Spiliopoulos which a Dane would recognise. If the images they generate are anything to go by, the Greek enjoys his nationality and its symbols with a pride which is quiet and unassertive, in rather the Scandinavian manner. The national flag seems to bring to his mind the childhood happiness - the sense of security - which many an over-50 Englishman recalls on seeing the red-white-and-blue which fluttered on bunting over Coronation streets.

Some of Spiliopoulos's work (not so much of it in London now) recalls Andy Goldsworthy's stuff, but to this eye improves on it by having a message. "In Lessons on a Greek Geography", which does have some echoes in London, he took the three fingers of Chalkidiki and made them into a stencil for use with the sun's shadows on beaches, and sometimes he used them for printing in coloured powder on the sand. In Denmark, he made a homage to honey and honey-making and though it's visually less than wonderful, the idea of the man from Europe's southerly archipelago amusing audiences in Europe's northerly archipelago is beguiling enough.

And then there is the constant use of photographs seen through a patina of wax masquerading as honey - or perhaps as candle-grease. It's as though the artist doesn't know whether to scrape through this shield which is involuntary and slightly resented, or whether he thinks it's as well there is a kind of aspic in which to preserve the cast-off childhood of which the snaps speak. Altogether a statisfying, if mild, event.

Wigmore Fine Art, 104 Wigmore Street, London W1