Raqib Shaw @ Manchester Art Gallery, until 26 May

The Manchester Art Gallery has, since Valentine’s Day, been host to that which lurks in the murky depths of the human unconscious – in a collection of works by Indian-born, London-based artist Raqib Shaw.

Adorned with willow and spring flowers for the exhibition’s duration, the gallery offers itself as a vessel upon which you’re welcome to embark to escape the city’s humdrum hum: but as you make your way into the building, it soon becomes apparent that this is not a place in which to find solace. Shaw’s work, though reminiscent of the old masters, transcends what we know – or rather, what we might want to know.

On first entering the show, the viewer may feel underwhelmed by the simple, classic use of space: a huge room with paintings on the walls, nothing on the floor, and nothing to trip over? Perhaps this initial impression comes from your writer having spent too much time in student exhibitions, where the sole purpose often seems to be to see how many people you can get to face-plant the floor in the name of participatory art. But in making our way over to the first painting in a line of many, that impulse feeling of, ‘Is this it?’ is revealed to have been unfounded.

Using kaleidoscopic colour, painstakingly painted enamel and thousands of tiny jewels, Shaw drags you into lush, verdant realms, which appear fantastical at first but, on closer inspection, throw the viewer into battle with scenes of violence, perversion, and sexual fetish.

Within Shaw’s constructed ecological visions exists a world that will excite even the most morbid of the viewer’s curiosities – or as David Lomas in his catalogue essay writes, the artist (and the viewer) witnesses ‘beauty mutate into a monstrous progeny that turns upon its creator.’ Shaw’s works reveal all too truly the reality that all that glitters is not gold.