The title of this exhibition, The Jack Freak Pictures, is alluring enough. It seems to add something new to the English language. Is Jack Freak a person, an illness, a dance? You could conclude all of the above after subjecting yourself to the blitzkrieg of these works.
Gilbert and George have found their moment – again. In the 1970s, they made furious images that were as shocking as punk. They raged at Britain's dreaming. Now the country is heading back down the toilet, they speak with a glorious guttural compassion about it all. The Britain in these pictures is scared, maddened, exciting, graffitied. The freaks who walk its mean streets and spooky parks are G&G themselves, playing visual games that distort their faces into cyclopean monstrosities; they turn their bodies inside out, and put themselves in impossible places and postures. Sometimes it's just an eye, moist and staring, that catches your attention in a chaotic pulse of medals, flags and street names. Yet, for all the apparent chaos, these pictures create kaleidoscopic structures that suggest everything is connected.
In Sunni, their grotesquely doubled faces float in a green and red vortex of undergrowth. In the moving Hecatomb, the artists stand in front of a wall of torn posters and street art while a collection of medals tells of fallen soldiers. The climactic downstairs gallery at Mason's Yard, where gigantic union flag pictures tower over you, is claustrophic, frightening. The works relate to the beholder like baroque canvases. They shake you. But Gilbert and George can also be very funny: Nettle Dance, in which they dance as if stung by nettles, is hilarious. After years of scepticism, I am now a fan.
Until 22 August, at White Cube's Hoxton and Mason's Yard galleries. Details: 020-7930 5373.
