Seldom scenes

Since the 1980s, Lisa Milroy has flitted easily through several different styles. She has painted seductive consumer goods in neat little rows, such as shoes and handbags.

She has painted gleaming street scenes and shop frontages which appear typical of so much poster art, the sort you'll find adorning the walls of cosy restaurants (though, it must be said, much better painted). And she has gone all abstract, painting vibrantly coloured, floating rectangles.

Latterly, however, Milroy has gone for an illustrative, cartoon style. For the Jerwood Painting Prize, for which she was shortlisted in 2001, she presented a strip-cartoon storyboard relating a typical day in her studio.

She also showed a painting of two moonfaced gossiping Geishas, done in a slightly heavy-handed pastiche of a classical Japanese print.

Now she has produced a whole series of Geishas, each painted in incongruous settings. So we find them putting their contact lenses in, playing blind man's buff, eating pizzas and drinking beer straight from the bottle. We find them in girlish huddles, riding horseback through the Wild West, or slow dancing in an Arizona barn.

Though Milroy has an undeniable ease in handling paint for very different stylistic effects, these illustrative works are, for me,

her least interesting incarnation. And, whether overtly humorous or not, there does seem to be a rather relentless, grating jauntiness to whatever she puts her brush to.

Until Mar 15, Alan Cristea, 31 Cork Street W1, Mon to Fri 10am to 5.30pm, Sat 10am to 1pm, free. Tel: 020 7439 1866. Tube: Green Park/Piccadilly Circus