Seducing the banal

Once occupied by tea merchants at the turn of the last century, the Tea Building is being restyled as the latest hot location for the East End's creative and media industries. Now the home of the Andrew Mummery Gallery, this raw complex of converted studios provides the inaugural setting for Scottish artist Carol Rhodes, and neither fails to impress.

Rhodes paints humdrum, out-of-town industrial landscapes from high vantage points. Isolated carparks, factories, a construction site, some scrubby piece of neglected land. These may not immediately seduce with the poetry of their subject matter, but there is poetry in Rhodes's painterly skills.

Reinvigorating the old cliche of finding beauty in the mundane, these banal settings provide rich material: colours are subdued, often with a bleached-out appearance, but are seductive and organic, and there is something of the acclaimed American landscape painter Milton Avery in her blocky shapes and her thin, choppy brushwork.

Rhodes's paintings are not accurate topographical studies. They seem, in part, to be imaginary landscapes, abstracted from the purely descriptive.

Perspectives shift and, without their titles, subjects are often hard to read. In Construction Site, a broad band of sludgy brown divides the picture horizontally, while linear swirls suggest the fissures and chasms of the earth; and an aerial depiction of a factory complex surrounded by trees and roads becomes a simple configuration of tiny blobs and snaking lines in Trees And Works. These are paintings that whisper rather than shout out loud.