Michael Landy, Saints Alive, National Gallery, review I've seen so many pictures of St Catherine with the wheel on which her body was broken that they no longer look strange to me. Only an eye as innocent as Landy's could have looked with amazement at a picture of a man kneeling in the desert with a lion at his side and wondered why he is striking his breast with a stone, or noticed a bloke walking around with the meat cleaver embedded in his brain and said to himself: "How very odd." To the literally minded, such images would speak of sadism and cruelty. Landy has recognised the absurdity of the legends and caught the affection with which Renaissance artists portray the saints, treating even the most gruesome martyrdom not as a gore-fest but as a metaphor for virtues like patience, faith, or endurance. Grotesque figures of Christian saints make up Michael Landy's new Saints Alive exhibition When Landy improvises with his own interpretation of a saint's traditional iconography, he does it in a way that is both generous and, in its own weird way, spot on. St Francis of Assisi gave all his possessions to the poor, and in this show he turns out to be still at it. Headless, he kneels to receive the stigmata while above him a mechanical grabber of the sort you see in lucky dips on seaside piers delves into the saint's hollow torso in an attempt to pick up a prize. Lucky winners will receive a free T-shirt emblazoned with the Franciscan vows of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience. It's a good joke, but you also sense that Landy thinks Britain could do with a little of St Francis's spirit. So far what I've described amount to an entertaining fairground attraction with a little art history thrown in to justify its presence in the National Gallery. But 'Saints Alive" is much more than that. What gives the exhibition depth and resonance is the way Landy's subject fits seamlessly into the extraordinary body of work he has been making for the past 20 years. His first big public success, for example, was an installation called 'Scrapheap Services" at the Tate Gallery, where uniformed sanitation engineers swept a floor covered with tens of thousands of discarded pieces of paper, each cut into the shape of a person. The faceless workmen then disposed of the paper people as efficiently as our society deals with the elderly, the ill, the damaged and the unborn. A few years later Landy made 'Breakdown," in which he worked non- stop for two weeks publicly to destroy every single possession he owned apart from the clothes he was wearing. In both pieces he cast a cold eye on a society with priorities so skewed that it often seems to place a higher value on the accumulation of possessions than it does on human life. And then Landy made his wonderful 'Acts of Kindness" in which he simply asked members of the public to describe in writing an instance in which they observed a stranger performing a selfless or generous act while travelling on the London underground. Suddenly Landy's interest in saints who were willing to suffer and die for their beliefs doesn't seem so remote from the subjects he's been dealing with throughout his career. What makes his take on the world so interesting to me is that he rejects both the materialism of Marxism on the one hand and of consumerism on the other in favour of a third possibility, that we can live our lives according to spiritual values, placing our trust in things we can't see or touch or own - whether that entails religious belief or not. What an artist. Until November 24. www.nationalgallery.org.uk