COMING out in all directions: Michele Mathison’s Extrusion. Photograph courtesy Whatiftheworld.

IT BEGINS WITH the stairs. Brutally bling-filled, impenetrably shiny and black, the introductory aspect of the Keyes Art Mile in Rosebank, the project of several wealthy consortia, which contains the Whatiftheworld gallery is not what you could describe as friendly. It’s pristine and shiny, slippery and steep and the hostile staircase leads to a vestibule which is dark and sterile, unpopulated and so designy you feel unable to breathe, in case you exude too unblingy an approach and get summarily tossed down those stairs by one of the strict-looking security guards for breaking fashion rules.

But as you let your eyes temper a little in the gloaming, you find them resting on Michele Mathison’s Parallax. This astonishing knot of real street lights feels at once like a mixture of an allusion to a traffic accident and a playful manipulation of the world itself. It evokes the extraordinary things that Mathison has done in the past with picks, creating rhythm and flow, song and fluidity with recalcitrant objects.

And as you cajole yourself into walking through that black marble space, your lonely footsteps creating sad little ‘plinks’ on the shined up surface, the sterile and expensive designs in the shops nearby looking forlorn, you reach the gallery proper. It’s a brightly lit space, and Mathison’s works on show give you pause. Yes, on one level, they fit the racy and shiny ethos of Keyes Art Mile, but they do so with a gentle dignity, not working on its crassness, but rather exploring the simplicity of its approach.

There are tricks in the works that belie the substantial nature of the medium. But these gestures never slip into the notion of the one-liner. When you realise that what you’re looking at in a work such as Distension – a series of wall-mounted pieces – is not a loosely stretched piece of fabric billowing from a canvas-stretcher, but rather a substantial body of carefully cast fullness, something dramatic leaps through your sensibilities. You get the joke, but you don’t move on, gripped as you are by the seductive presence of the works.

They wax and they wane, singing ancient songs of Zimbabwean stone and odes to what can be done with untempered steel. There are works which are rusted and others twisted against the grain. The abstraction of the pieces is beguiling and mesmerising, as the title of Mathison’s exhibition dodges and veers against political references and descriptions of the abstract relationships between stone and metal that he has constructed here.

It’s a beautiful exhibition, and one imminently worth experiencing even in this rich and newish space, because it offers a generous and intimate levity to works that could otherwise have been ponderous or self-indulgent.

• States of Emergence by Michele Mathison is at Whatiftheworld, Rosebank, Johannesburg, until August 19. 012 358 6750.