Charles Avery @ Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Charles Avery’s Islanders is an astonishingly good exhibition. ’Good’ is necessarily too facile a term: it is fascinating, entrancing, a truly immersive experience that is quite frankly a joy to behold. I first went an hour and a half before the gallery closed and became so absorbed I only made it halfway through. Making the return trip was a pleasure, and I felt disconcertingly exhilarated upon leaving.

The Islanders is an ongoing project, which has thus far spanned four years. Avery has essentially created a whole new world, an island far away from civilisation previously undocumented by modern cartography, complete with weird creatures, mythic rituals and even its own pantheon of gods. Mr Impossible, the god created after a philosophical argument in the pub who uses his divinity to solicit casual sex with mortal women, is a particular stroke of genius.

The world is manifest in the gallery in the form of drawing, sculpture, skewed taxidermy and lyrical, witty writing. It emerges gradually in the course of exploring the space, as fragments of material culture and pseudo-folk tale accumulate to form an imaginary society, Avery creating a multi-dimensional version of magical realism. The work explores a multitude of themes, from the nature of tourism and of exploration, through pitch perfect asides on the nature of intellectualism, to questions of class, of prejudice, of addiction. The world is one of glamour and squalor, of minutely skewed realities that create the illusion of exoticism while simultaneously mirroring our own. Henderson’s Eggs, for example: a government approved recipe for pickled eggs that are “bitterly disgusting, yet ruinously addictive”, whose “value is so assured that in the underworld they are used as currency”. Avery metaphorically explores issues of culpability in the existence of addiction in our own world, while never losing a sense of a magical other.

In an art world where we all too frequently spend time in galleries looking without seeing, standing in front of works through a sense of obligation rather than as a result of any sort of engagement, The Islanders is a rare gift. If you only see one exhibition this month, or indeed this year, make it this one. Go. There are only a couple of weeks left. [Rosamund West]