Introspection - Extramission, Phillip Warnell, Royal Pump Room, Leamington until June 15

Both for the artist and the spectator, art is all about looking.

Russian medical student, Natasha Demkina claims to be able to do this better than most by dint of her X-ray vision.

Artist Pillip Warnell clearly believes her - and this is an area where belief is everything because there’s a lot of quackery about in the world of alternative medicine.

The filmed encounter between artist and subject won’t convince everyone therefore, since it amounts to little more than an artistically filmed staring match as Demkina silently scans the artist’s body with those cleverly penetrating eyes. I say silently but there’s a truly mysterious thing happening offstage as an electronic harp-like instrument is being ‘played’ even though it has no strings!

It underlines the mesmeric quality of the film, its poetic commentary made all the more seductive by the Dr Zhivago tones of its narrator.

But it is the heavenly harp and a photographic set of exotic looking stones extracted from unlikely parts of the body that stole the show for me. These photographs are beautiful and are beautifully dsiplayed, as everything is in this highly professional show.

But the documentary quality of the content calls into question its status as art. We are presented with sets of medical facts and pseudo-facts but where, I can’t help wondering, is the vision. Peter McCarthy

Verdict: Mesmeric. But is it art?