Love in translation

There is a work of art flyposted all over the city by one of contemporary art's most intriguing artists. You might well have spotted it from the bus on your way down Oxford Street, plastered on the wall beside the Kentucky Fried Chicken, or by the Euston underpass, but you almost certainly will not have recognised it as art. In an age when many worry about the meaning of new art, Maurizio Cattelan has produced a work which both demands and resists translation.

Although part of the Serpentine's State of Play group exhibition, Cattelan's work is nowhere to be seen in the gallery, and there is no sign directing the viewer elsewhere. The work is very simple: a text written in Arabic in white letters on a black background, printed up as a poster. I have seen them on my way home, around the Regent's Park mosque, and where Marble Arch leads into the Lebanese restaurants of Edgware Road.

Those who do not read Arabic might jump to the conclusion that it is a religious edict or militant propaganda. Ignorance is a vacuum that is readily filled by prejudice and Cattelan is playing on that lack of understanding. He has said that the poster is about "fear for the things we don't understand, and the things we think we do".

I have a romantic affiliation to the Arabic language, and I called his bluff, took a poster and pieced together a translation with my friend Muriel, occasionally consulting her friend Daisy by telephone for some of the more obscure idioms.

It turns out to be a beautiful text (the origin of which Cattelan will not reveal): a love letter written by a man to his absent paramour. The style is archly metaphorical and, like so many Arabic love songs, centred on love lost, rather than passion consummated. "Habibati - my darling," it begins, as they always do. The lover looks out of the window upon a stone wall, speaking of a love that is strong enough to cross great distances, but the distance grows ever wider. He ends by mourning, " Without you, there is no existence for me."

I resist reading these words as a metaphor for our divided world; the struggle to understand the text is meaning enough. Arabic is, for me, a language of nostalgia - for something I fear I might lose, or worse, that I never had. I grew up listening to my mother speaking it to my grandmother when they wanted to keep things secret from me. In her last years, my grandmother spoke Arabic to me when we were alone, and I desperately struggled for even a smattering of understanding. I learned to fill in the gaps.

Cattelan's work plays on those gaps. The few browsers coming out of evening prayers at the mosque last night who stopped to read the text seemed bemused. They would recognise the style, but could not begin to recognise this unsigned, untitled document as a work of art.

Padua-born Cattelan, 43, is one of art's best-known provocateurs. The jokey charm to his work hides a serious sensibility that lets him get away with murder. He is the artist - born Catholic, as it happens - whose lifelike mannequin of the Pope struck down by a meteor caused such a stir at the Royal Academy's Apocalypse exhibition in 2000. In 2001 he created - dare one admit it? - an almost cute Mini-Me Hitler, the size of a ventriloquist's dummy, kneeling, forlorn, alone in a vast Stockholm gallery. For the last Venice Biennale he made a model of a little boy on a remotecontrolled-bicycle to race around the Giardini, driving viewers to distraction. Two years before, he represented Italy by bussing a select group out of the Venice mêlée to view his giant "Hollywood" lettering scaffolded onto the Palermo hills.

I wanted to ask Cattelan about these latest flyposters. But, ever the itinerant, he was away in Italy and my questions were relayed by email, read to him by telephone, and his responses dictated back to me via someone else's email. I suspect that he enjoyed the extra mediation.

"I think it is a project about ambiguity, like many of my other works," he suggested. "It is interesting to set something in motion and not have complete control of the effect. It's for anyone who wants to take it and turn it into something else."