In a simple-minded analysis, quite a lot of art is about shapes and colours, and that’s certainly true of Beatriz Milhazes. The Brazilian artist makes small-ish collages out of bits of paper and things, large-ish paintings that seem to be based on collages and – in this show – some big dangly mobiles and an absolute whopper of a tapestry. ‘Rio Azul’ is 16m long and the best thing here. It took expert French weavers two years to produce from hand-dyed wool, and must be a leading global candidate for moth insurance. Like the rest of Milhazes’s work, it is built up from geometric motifs which ripple and return in various combinations: circles, wavy lines, parabolas. The vibrant pink, yellow and orange dyes make it glow in way that the collages and paintings here don’t, really. For all that, though, there’s something sombre and dowdy about it: as if the mammoth planning it required has sucked the spirit out of it. The mobiles are more fun: constructed from plastic elements, they’re like giant versions of those crappy bracelets you get in Christmas crackers. One looks like a super-blingy remake of the classic Chinese takeaway bead curtain, through which a psychedelic delivery rider might emerge with a bag of prawn crackers.
Milhazes’s palimpsests lend themselves to a kind of rumination about art and process and layers and lots of things, but they don't really either trouble you or deliver a knockout punch of pure visual splendour. Thy look pretty great when I arrive, and they look pretty great when I go, but they leave me and the multi-dimensional insanity of the twenty-first century unchanged.