Whale watch in Jay's new space

Success has brought dealer Jay Jopling and his gallery, White Cube, full circle. In 1993 he opened a tiny space on Duke Street, St James's, surrounded by old galleries full of hunting paintings.

A few meetings, dead sharks, soiled beds and obscene mannequins later, and White Cube was the most famous gallery in the UK, home of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapman Brothers.

His second space, in the insalubrious environs of Hoxton Square, became emblematic of the YBA phenomenon and the East End subculture partly inspired by it.

Now, in Mason's Yard, a small child's stone throw from his original site, Jopling has built a gallery, the first new, free-standing building seen in St James's for 30 years.

The impressive, tasteful, modernist rectangle houses 5,000 feet of exhibition space, the main basement floor gallery an impressive double-height space.

Occupying it to full effect is the centrepiece of Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco's show. Dark Wave is a grander reiteration of his most famous work to date, Black Kites (1997), in which he decorated a human skull with a geometric grid.

Here he has covered a 14-metre long replica whale skeleton, suspended from the ceiling, with a circular-based pattern, drawn in pencil.

The result resembles an exhibit from the Natural History Museum hijacked by a methodical occultist, as Orozco has identified cardinal points of the skeleton such as the eye sockets, from which concentric circles emanate outwards as metaphors for energy, eventually overlapping to form areas of powerful visual complexity.

Set against the smooth gallery walls, the object, the irregular remains of the giant aquatic creature decorated by hand, strikes a strange yet wonderful note.

On the ground-floor gallery, Orozco's interest in the intersection between art and methods of mapping is more mutely investigated in 12 works from his The Samurai Tree series of paintings. He uses four colours, painted into circular forms; their size and positioning follow an obscure set of rules.

Taken as a whole, the element of visual and conceptual game-playing becomes a game for the viewer, and a metaphor for our relationship with the systems that govern our world, whose natures can be understood only partially, but still touch our sense of the sublime.

Gabriel Orozco, SW1
White Cube, SW1