Mauro Peruchetti’s work is a mixture of Minimalism and Pop, fused together with an elegance and an ironic wit that seem typical of a certain kind of Italian sensibility.

For example, one of his key symbols is the Jelly Baby – a little sweet in rudimentary human form, which for him symbolizes the disposability that permeates all aspects of the contemporary consumer society. He uses it to mock the aspirations that this society claims that it has, but which it so often cynically betrays. What we meet in this exhibition are a Jelly Baby converted into a giant image of Buddha, and rows of Jelly Babies in different colours who come together to create the model of a skyscraper – an imaginary headquarters for the United Nation in New York, slightly grander and more elegant than its present building. We also meet a roll of toilet paper entirely covered in Swarowski crystals – as pithy a metaphor as one can imagine for useless, senseless and perhaps injurious luxury.

The idea of a ‘moralised’ Pop may at first seem paradoxical, since Pop, in its original American form was amoral in the most literal sense, uninterested in social issues and also in codes of conduct. However, it is at this point that one has to recall that Perucchetti is Italian. Though he lives and works in Britain. The Italian Arte Povera movement, founded in 1967, took over ideas from American Minimalism and Conceptual Art and used them as the basis for a powerful social critique that was not to be found in the transatlantic originals. Perucchetti operates the same way vis ˆ vis his Pop source materials. The works in this show have a studied elegance which seems, to use the adjective in a loose sense, very Italian. But they also make pithy comments on a wide range of moral issues.