The art of Keir Smith often have the appearance of remains, fragments of a structure that has either been dismembered with violence or that has never been free from the possibility of its own slow undoing.

His fascination with rubble, with the dissolution of something built to last, has a paradoxical motivation in the desire to collect and preserve relics of a traditional symbolism whose most familiar scenarios we now respond to with a feeling of estrangement.

This concern with different kinds of dilapidation, with the destruction of buildings, and with the disarticulation of some of the most influential stories in western culture, has its roots in a mixture of biographical and cultural memories. Since childhood, the artist reports, he has brooded on the aftermath of bomb damage inflicted during the Second World War, both on the city of London and on certain Italian churches where the artistic loss has haunted his creative imagination.

His retrieval of the pictorial and decorative schemes originally commissioned for these spaces has involved a crucial revision of the role of decoration with regard to the principal subjects of the paintings involved.

From an early twenty-first-century viewpoint, certain features that would have been central to the artist’s conception are now relatively peripheral to the range of our usual concerns, while attention to the marginal details in the composition gives them a significance that is magnified many times beyond original expectations.

It is not that Keir Smith is simply mimicking the historical shift in what we recognize as culturally significant, far from it. Rather, his inspection of the most frequently overlooked areas of the painting finds in them strong implications of the need to refocus our reading of the iconography.

The flaws and fissures in the stonework depicted are not irrelevant, but directly informative about the general condition of the world in which the figures stand or sit. The siting of the sculpture Landscape with Carlo and Elena (2003) in the present exhibition makes a similar point.

The cloisters at the centre of the College no longer serve the purpose of providing space for movement conducive to meditation, they are simply a thoroughfare. Most members of College use only those arcades that will get them from one place to another. Keir Smith’s installation has restored the itinerary of the original design, encouraging contemplation on the construction of meaning.