Glimpses into Enrico's weird fantasy world

Enrico David is one of the most intriguing artists working in Britain today, as one might expect from someone who titles one of his works The Squelching of the Slippers. He is represented by Cabinet, an avant-garde though irritatingly self-important London gallery, many of whose artists are reviving and integrating obscure early modernist design into their work.

In the bigger picture, the 40-year-old, Italian-born David belongs to the first new international "movement" of 21st century art, consisting of artists who have returned to figuration - story-telling in art - turning against a half-century of concepts and abstraction. These artists, among them Karen Kilimnik, pick a historical style, and recreate it fetishistically in images and installations which offer glimpses into a weird fantasy world.

David's simple colours and swirling lines are hugely indebted to Art Nouveau graphic artists (especially Aubrey Beardsley and Erté) and his art could lapse into shameless plagariasm. But instead he takes this design nostalgia and runs with it to a camp, libidinous and surrealist world in which figures in masks appear on spotlit stages in small gouaches, a Wellington boot with metal splints becomes sculpture and a photograph of a hairy bottom is collaged into an Art Deco drawing of a trumpet.

The installations in the ICA's upper galleries are stunning. In one room the artist conjures up a theatre of sexual perversity with a frieze of dancing figures in inlaid wood, a huge hanging medal of shiny black plastic and an illuminated orb, and large sewn pictures of male figures, which look strangely like plywood furniture in erotic poses.

If the criticism could be made that David's work is slight, it is only because his style is so concise and his imagination so tantalising, that one is left wanting more.

Until 11 November. www.ica.org.uk.

Enrico David: Ultra Paste
ICA Gallery
The Mall, SW1Y 5AH