Micallef is back in his first solo show for three years. The detachment and dislocation, displayed by his Harajuku girls and Giant Freaks, is still there, but this is altogether a much darker chocolate. He has stayed much closer to home this time, and a pretty disturbing picture of home he paints.

Stepping into this show is like stepping back in time into a Victorian lunatic asylum.
Head studies with reddened mouths, have the look of feasting zombies or of cunnilingus performed on menstruating partners. His Bacon-esque self-portraits and faces stare out at you with despair, like desperate in-mates for the terminally insane. They are bold, challenging, arresting, and quite brilliant, but would you want them looking at you in the morning over your bowl of Cheerios?

‘Becoming Animal’ takes that theme literally at times, whether morphing faces into beasts or planting the heads of jackals on to his subjects. Then Antony Micallef takes on the sex traffickers. Perhaps the connection here is the animalistic behaviour of man and the traffickers. He takes the sex phone cards that clog the phone booths of Soho and manipulates the messages to alert us of the horrors behind the surface offering. But does this shock tactic tell us anything we don’t know? Yes, it’s all very terrible, but what does he want us to do about it? He’s preaching to the converted here. The real perverts and gangsters that perpetrate these crimes will, I suspect, be unmoved. And ironically, for all the darkness in this show, and there is much, this subject matter is the most lightweight.

Becoming Animal, at Lazarides, 11 Rathbone Place until 22 Oct.

Highly Recommended