Martyrs in Hackney

I thought I was never going to get to the Elevator Gallery, with only 20 minutes to go before it closed and White Post Lane in Hackney Wick winding darkly down from the station. Finally there was an A4 notice pointing the way and, just as I was again despairing, another which meant I did, finally, locate Unit 9 on the Hamlet Industrial Estate and the exhibition I'd come to see, having had to miss the opening night a few days before. 'Martyrs' looks at the theme of martyrdom and suffering for a cause - or just suffering - with especial reference to some of the more extreme stories of Christian saints. Some of the work on show was cathartic mental-illness art, all very well but nothing technically special. The highlights were the treatments of saints produced by Consuelo Giorgi whose lurid photography decorates the exhibition poster, and by Matteo Alfonsi. Their styles are very different but as both are Italian Goths you can guess where they're coming from.

Consuelo's images are ultra-glossy, brightly-coloured photographs with an awful lot of blood in them: the poster has St Apollonia in the process of having her tongue cut out by an unseen torturer whose arms reach from behind her. There is a rather witty statement in her picture of St Cecilia: Cecilia is patron saint of music and musicians, supposedly not-quite decapitated in a botched execution and left dying for three days, and if you go to the catacombs in Rome you can see the statue of her laid in the position she died in. Consuelo poses her Cecilia in the same way ... only lying on a piano with music ready. Matteo's saints are depicted in a strange, stylised pop-art style and look like they've stepped out of Slimelight moments before. I like his St Apollonia with her halo tipped with torn-out teeth; the only problem is that he's seen a pair of what he thinks are torturer's pincers and doesn't realise they are sugar nippers, but then I don't suppose he's ever worked in a small local museum with a whole box of the wretched things.

Despite all the blood and dismemberment, like the Catholic iconography they draw on, these Gothic treatments of saintly martyrs don't really involve any real pain; pain is hard to depict in any case, but these ladies (there is one St Sebastian in the show) are serenely beyond physical feeling. I'm not sure that's what happens to genuine saints.