Quiet subversive plays it straight

Jeff Wall has built an immense international reputation through luminous, epic scenes with unlikely twists. His alluring narratives, portrayed by anonymous extras choreographed inside landscapes and mundane interiors, are enhanced by digitally collaged trickery.

But this latest project, featuring three huge, glowing colour light-boxes and six black-and-white photographs, will leave viewers struggling with the knowledge that now he is playing straight; presenting "reality".

The main gallery's focus, Dressing Poultry, freezes three people processing chickens inside a chaotically intimate barn. Our eyes pan the room, from the grotesquely endearing smile of a woman gutting a bird, to her incongruously white trainers, then stop at the startlingly red liver lying on the floor, like a detail from a Goya painting.

The black-and-white images are starker and include two important reflections of our age. Men Waiting sees a queue of silent men waiting at dawn to be bussed to factories or building sites - competing for work in a historical continuum linking to Orwell and Zola.

In contrast, War Games presents a park where a black boy sits on a chair with a toy gun, overseeing an enclosure of bed-ends and tyres which hides two boys playing dead. The raw grin on one boy's face mimics the moment of death, while around him normal life continues (a woman with shopping, boys playing football) - a disturbing reminder of the media-constructed fantasies in young imaginations.

Jeff Wall is a quiet subversive and his new work is surprising in new ways. In spite of prices approaching half-a-million dollars, he hasn't spun into ever more sensational digital experiment but drawn closer to ordinary experience, still with a sting, and entered the world of true documentary.

Until 19 January. Information: 020 7930 5373, www.whitecube.com.

Jeff Wall
White Cube At Mason's Yard
Mason's Yard, SW1Y 6BU