The din outside abates slightly when the visitor enters Richard Lewer’s Adam and Eve, an exhibition featuring a new series of paintings for the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Triennial. Gently spot-lit on dark grey walls, twelve images interpret the creation story according to the Book of Genesis. Each work is titled after the passage it pictures. Blooms of colour form darkness and light, hills and skies, flora and fauna, radiating small flecks of paint that animate the landscape’s fusing into being. The paintings’ human subjects—Adam and Eve—arise from their surfaces in clotted, syrupy white, coagulating with their fluid environments.

A sixteenth-century Antwerp altarpiece, the Carved retable of the Passion of Christ (c.1511–20), from the NGV’s collection is presented in conversation with Lewer’s series. Its paintings and carved, gold-encrusted insets depict scenes from Jesus’ life as told in the New Testament. Importantly, the characters are dressed in Flemish garb so the congregation could see themselves reflected in its images. Within each inset they form an astonishing mass of heads, limbs and drapes, craning to watch as Jesus is born, performs miracles, is tried, condemned and crucified.

Adam and Eve’s desires shatter the harmonious relations they share with the world around them. In the altarpiece, figures crowd around the divinely innocent Jesus, unblinking witnesses to the injustices he endures at the hands of the Romans. Contrasting in age, state and origin, the paintings and the altarpiece form an arrangement of religious scripture through its visual interpretation. The works offer a compelling reflection on how such texts travel and can be read in relation to the world of the viewer/ believer. Both paintings and altarpiece offer stories for our times.

Outside this room whirs the rollercoaster of the Triennial’s more than 100 artist projects. Some stand alone as immersive installations, others are curated selections that flood the permanent collections. There’s painting, sculpture, photography, video, robots, memes and a (now meme-ified) banana. We consume the art hastily, zig-zagging through content that now entertains, now informs, now tickles, now disturbs.

Church pews have been placed within Adam and Eve, creating a space to sit and reflect. Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space comes to mind. In its opening paragraphs, he compares the modern gallery to a Christian church. For both, “the outside world must not come in”; the object of contemplation— the art, the spirit—is not to be interrupted.[01] This detachment from the fray of signifiers outside is why everything in a gallery is perceived as almost sacred in status, including the “ashtray” or “firehose,” as O’Doherty writes (or, we might say, the banana).[02] Within such closed circuits of values and ideas, “the object frequently becomes the medium through which these ideas are manifested”—that is how art becomes art, or how the spiritual is translated for the material plane.[03]

In an accompanying public programme to Lewer’s project, subsequently displayed in a room next to Adam and Eve, gallery visitors confessed their darkest secrets to Lewer in a confessional made of pegboard, modelled on one he knew growing up a Catholic in Kirikiriroa Hamilton. He then painted these secrets onto wall panels, cracking open the traditionally confined, confidential space. The told vary from mild to unnerving (real confessionals have certainly heard worse) and visitors crowd around them to read every scandal. The texts picture only a small corner of human consciousness: the enmeshed boundaries, standards, desires and weaknesses that shape individual sense of self. Together they exhibit a kind of collective humanity, warts and all, made visible through an unorthodox ‘religious’ ritual.

A web of tiny wires creeps around the friezes in the altarpiece, rigged to a computer that apparently measures the fluctuating humidity and the work’s responses to these changes. The structure towers over the room, a cyborg medium between human, matter and higher realm. Taking a rest from the Triennial marathon, beneath the adrift altarpiece, the chasm between the gallery and the church couldn’t feel wider. While art with spiritual or religious influences is not uncommon in the art gallery, it is important to consider whether these images and objects are still themselves in such spaces. Lewer’s project brings the incompatibilities home, but it also asks what potential there is for the art experience to rise up to meet them.

Lewer’s work wrestles with a complex lineage of representation that delivers a story such as the one of Adam and Eve to the secular gallery space. It’s one story among a myriad of others, of various origins, belief systems and world makings. Such age-old analogies refract through the pressing issues of our time, but they also carry with them particular traditions of interpretation that help viewers contend with their messages.