I said I live in London, right? But that doesn’t mean I’m London-centric, and I do believe there’s life outside the capital. A while ago I was visiting a pal in Manchester and came across the Manchester Art Gallery and my first Raqib Shaw exhibition.

Even before you got to the gallery you could guess it wasn’t going to be a regular gig. Shaw wasn’t confined to the second floor but spilled out onto the street. He covered the iron fencing around the gallery in shrubs and slim tree trunks with nests of daffodil bulbs cocooned in moss. It all looked quite spring-y once the daffodils bloomed!

The floral attack continued inside the main atrium where placid plants hang off the walls and hand railings, like a mini Hanging Garden of Babylon. The centrepiece was the statue in a shrine of plants and flowers on the staircase landing. A swan was raping a half-man/half-bat and, in a moment of rapture, ripping out the heart of his sex companion. Like most people there I self-consciously stuck my head right into the shrine where the swan action was occurring to see if it made any more sense. It didn’t.

This flowers/sex/death kicked off on a grand scale in the main exhibition hall. Exoticism, beauty, violence and animals seemed closely interwoven in all of Shaw’s work, no less so than in another sculpture ensemble capturing a crayfish fornicating with a man-eagle. Graphically violent than the swan but as realistic, in my mind the brutal crescendo was just round the corner. Or was it just me imagining the worst?

There was the same attention to detail evident in all Shaw’s work- the toes on the human foot were so life-like, you’d think its spasms could restart any moment. Realism and focus on the small underline the brutality of Shaw’s world. He blurs the line between human, animal, beautiful and sick and manipulates your own imagination to picture the unthinkable.

Shaw’s work (can be loosely described as paintings) made the rest of the sizable exhibition. They all are just as busy with detailed, miniature-like attention to small and inlaid with rhinestones.

It a shame his chosen media doesn’t photograph well and the illustrations in catalogues in the gallery shop gave only faint impressions of the originals.

Have to admit- this obsession with the symbolism, narrative and the detail, that would give the Pre-Raphaelites a run for their money, makes his work look very busy and after a few pictures you reach your limit of how much you can take in. As exciting as it is to see so many of Shaw’s works in the same space, it would be interesting to see his work next to what actually influenced him, like other artists or his Indian roots. Can’t remember this being mentioned anywhere else, but the almost OCD-like preoccupation with the small reminds of Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.

In his video Shaw points out the painters who influenced him, or details of which paintings he incorporated in his own work. But he didn’t say how they influenced him. I suppose no artist can completely explain comprehensively his work, because that’s not what visual art is about. In fact, the less you talk about the work the better.