Artist Cerith Wyn Evans fires up the White Cube

Heat is not an artistic material I am familiar with. Of course, it can create art. It's used to melt bronze and weld steel. It is therefore remembered as an afterglow, a searing spectre, in almost all sculpture made from metal. I used to have a poster of the first Richard Serra exhibition I ever saw, at Matthew Marks gallery in New York, which was decorated with a black-and-white photograph of glowing slabs of steel emerging from a mill. Heat is in many old paintings, too: fires blaze horribly in depictions of hell or of the industrial revolution's satanic mills.

But Cerith Wyn Evans has done something bold and strange in creating a wall of real, intense, dreadful heat in his exhibition at White Cube, Mason's Yard. Upstairs a cool, eerie mood is created by swaying and rotating mirrored mobiles and fragments of elusive audio. It is melancholic, troubling; but that is as nothing compared with the blast of blazing power that fills the downstairs gallery. The air has been sculpted – it is substantial. Glowing columns, each one in fact a colossal electric fire, warm the room unbearably. Most people stand at the edge of the furnace. To walk among the bright columns is to endure a deeply unpleasant, threatening thickness of scorched air.

What's it all about? The heated basement gallery speaks potently enough of the rage of desire, the agonies of the flesh. It's like some monstrous nightclub down there – or hell. You travel down to it, after all. With the more ethereal sadness of the upstairs installation this is a deeply arresting, startling display of what makes Cerith Wyn Evans at his best such a personal, original and adventurous artist. It closes soon; make the effort to see this – it's special.