Exhibition review: Handle Hamad Butt with care

A vision of great danger glows before you in the Whitechapel Gallery. It takes the form of 18 glass spheres suspended only inches from the floor. Lemon, citrine, chartreuse, each is seductively coloured, their overlapping shadows below a festival of light. But each is so coloured because of what it contains: chlorine gas, one of the most poisonous substances on Earth.

The art of Hamad Butt (1962-94) is a delicate dance with death. Most of what survives was made at the height of the Aids epidemic which ended his own short life. It is extremely moving to see a work here directly invoking the glass-fronted notice cabinets at the Middlesex hospital where Butt died at the age of 32. Transmission is lettered in administrative gold at the top. Inside, oblique haiku run across sugar paper pages, concerning blind fear and blind faith, invisible stigmata, dark light and marks of contagion.

Black flies, feeding off the sugar paper, have hatched inside these cabinets – where they will also die. For now, they are just trapped in an institutional impasse. Transmission, not incidentally, was made for Butt’s degree show at Goldsmiths in June 1990. The following month, fellow graduate Damien Hirst exhibited A Thousand Years, in which maggots hatched into far more famous art flies, feasting on sugar water and a cow’s severed head, before being zapped on a UV light.

Butt’s cabinets are quietly shocking. So is the ring of open glass books, lit by ultraviolet lamps, surrounding a pile of something dark as a burned-out bonfire on the floor. These are the primitive goggles once used to examine Butt’s fragile etchings of triffids on the glass pages. Nowadays, we are all in health-and-safety glasses before even entering the gallery and cordons prevent us from going anywhere near a chlorine disaster. But Butt’s plagues of carnivorous triffids maintain their devastating power in the gloaming.

Born in Lahore, Butt moved to England with his family in 1964. He always drew, though his parents hoped their son would be a biochemist. Paintings and drawings fill the upper floors of this show – subtle, solitary, private. Wall texts referring to his Muslim upbringing and experience as a gay Pakistani in the late 1980s help to inflect our sense of his art, but the drawings remain elusive.

Your eye catches on certain motifs. A wall of crosses that is itself then crossed out. A lightbulb swinging on a wire. Receding arches. A Sinuous Arm, drawn in white chalk on cobalt, resembles a Matisse cutout. A pensive face, in luminous pale green, is almost invisible in a spacey interior. I take it to be the artist himself.

Out of what looks like a spinal column shoot stems of spring-green arrows. A crescent moon hangs above emptiness. It is difficult to interpret Butt’s visual language in every work, but their atmosphere is always radiantly mysterious.

Lines turn to curving glass spears, tipped with virulent scarlet bromine in the sculpture Hypostasis (the pooling of blood). And then to the rungs of a ladder soaring high up the wall in Substance Sublimation Unit. Each glows on and then gradually off, ascending slowly upwards before descending again, and so on – a red light that reflects flame to crimson to pink on the wall behind, before leaving an empty glass cylinder.

Iodine crystals are repeatedly heated into toxic gases. Colour, at least in these gallery conditions, becomes an overwhelming attribute. But this seems only part of the mordant truth of Butt’s art, which is that nature, the elements and even medicine, like this beautiful stairway to heaven, can also kill.

The Freud Museum, an increasingly significant venue for art stars, has interpolated the paintings and sculptures of Glenn Brown and Mathew Weir into that curious treasury of objects and ideas in Hampstead. At one end of the heavily muffled study, Weir’s painting of a torrent dividing a cliff hangs directly below a closeup of Freud’s head. At the other end, Brown’s double-headed portrait, in his wildly writhing yet infinitely careful brushstrokes, hangs behind the Janus statue that still stands, directly opposite the famous couch, on Freud’s desk.

Brown is closer to drawing than ever, his meticulously painted lines depicting the look of brushmarks; depictions of depictions. A tree dangles upside down, its roots turning into clouds, its branches into a gesturing hand. His Renaissance woman, deep in thought but riddled with enigmatic organs and eyes, is like a Dürer print rendered in grisaille oils. A bronze nymph, halfway up the stairs, disappears into a towering cornetto of 3D brushstrokes: painting subsuming sculpture.

Weir’s bronze wolf, fairytale-scale, has no tail, fur or eyes and an axe in its back. Red Riding Hood slays. His wide-open animal trap, with its golden teeth – positioned beneath dream paintings by Freud’s Wolf Man patient – is an obvious vagina dentata. Weir has made extraordinarily refined drawings in his own blood, resembling sepia ink, in which the human anatomy is minutely represented as a flourishing arterial tree.

Connections between the two artists are ever more apparent. Both work their canvases with meticulous, not to say obsessive, industry, constantly alluding to the surface flatness. Weir has found a way to reproduce blurs that is simply invisible to the human eye. Especially startling is his transcription of a child’s drawing of a terrifying critter – one of Freud’s patients, depicting domestic abuse – on to a landscape that conflates The Sound of Music with Caspar David Friedrich. What was confined is now marauding outdoors.

Some shows at the Freud Museum illuminate the artist more than the analyst. This one, uniquely, radiates in all directions. A perfect old master drawing of an ear (by Weir) is pinned high among the bookshelves to remind us that Freud’s work was about listening to his patients, not looking at them in the manner of his teacher, the French neurologist Charcot. But of course dreams are fundamentally visual. All the statues, totems and archetypal images Freud collected reflect the teeming visions in our minds in exactly the same way as these wild modern artworks.

Hamad Butt: Apprehensions is at Whitechapel Gallery, London E1, until 7 September

Glenn Brown and Mathew Weir: The Sight of Something is at Freud Museum, London NW3, until 19 October

Photographs courtesy of Jamal Butt, Galerie Max Hetzler, Michael Barrett