We all have a passing acquaintance with the generic instructional figures from airline safety cards. Nameless cartoons that we glance at while the aircraft taxis, then dismiss from our minds as we replace the card in the seat-back pocket.

Xero has not dismissed them. He has exalted them in a series of paintings, comprising his exhibition entitled “Flight Zero”. Freed from the constraining narrative context of the safety cards, the figures become paintings that are bold, beautiful and simple, and at the same time, quietly unsettling and thought-provoking.

A close-up shows a woman’s hands buckling her life-vest over her seatbelt and green dress. A family run across a desert landscape, their colours and forms melted by the printing process. A mother comforts her young son as they sit, clad in orange life-jackets on the inflatable raft outside the plane, floating on a windswept ocean.

The designers’ attempts to render these instructional diagrams in an international language understandable by everyone has given these images an immediate appeal. The artist’s removing them from their instructional context reminds us of the profoundly disturbing circumstances informing the instructions – the plane is crashing.

And yet this central motif – the plane crash – is not directly depicted on the safety cards or in the artist’s work. What other dark mysteries does this allude to? Perhaps these paintings embody Picasso’s refrain – a lie that reveals to us the truth. But they also beg the question - What of all the other contents of our digital-age infosphere? Are the TVs and billboards, like these paintings, proclaiming truth-telling lies, or just an endless stream of deceptive “truths”? Rather than the imaginary visual motif of the plane crash, I think it is this question that is the dark mystery at the heart of this artist’s work.

Though this question and the works themselves are fundamentally (post)modern, their religious titles remind us of painting’s history. The absence of the crash itself parallels the underground lives of the early Christians, for whom the crucifixion was an image too potent to be made real.

The artist presents themes and titles that have occupied painters since the early Middle Ages – Communion, Holy Family, Exodus, Queen of Heaven, Halo, Ark. While these are traditional motifs, they are not represented in traditional ways. The Queen of Heaven is a faceless female passenger in a blue dress. Halo is a ring of people holding hands while they float in the ocean (or is it the sky?) awaiting either rescue, or their demise. The Holy Family is a random collection of survivors thrown together by fate onto the same raft.

This stark contrast, between the traditional representations of these traditional motifs, and these unashamedly postmodern reworkings constitutes their conceptual strength. In it is a powerful comment on, and reflection of, the times in which we live.