Plinth

Performing You is a slightly atypical addition to Peake's show, in that it throws the spotlight briefly back onto the visitor. The rest of the exhibition is explicitly about the artist performing himself - presenting his personal reflections on his early life. 'Concrete Pitch' is inspired by Peake's memories of Finsbury Park, where he grew up. Like so many other Londoners he whiled away hours on a local concrete recreation ground: it was there that he and others went to play football, experiment with graffiti, listen to music, and hang out. Now, he has gathered these formative pastimes together on his new turf, the concrete space of the contemporary art gallery.

A sense of surreal nostalgia pervades 'Concrete Pitch', which is conceived as an immersive environment with each individual piece contributing to the whole. The first artwork listed is the lighting: evenly spaced spotlights in the ceiling have reddish-pink filters and bathe the room in an ethereal but slightly seedy glow. The effect is like something between a perpetual sunset and a strangely calm nightclub. Oldskool jungle and drum and bass music sounds throughout the space, and on entering the visitor is brought face to face with its source: DJs from Kool London, a longstanding underground radio station that Peake knew in his youth as Kool FM, are broadcasting directly from White Cube for the duration of the show, visible behind the large window of a specially constructed booth.

Colourful paintings line the walls: many are abstract compositions of smoothly sprayed paint layers and snaking, intersecting lines; others incorporate text - in one, the phrase 'A more uncomfortable and realistic history' is legible, its heavily distorted letters combining to form the shape of a face in profile. Graffiti, clip-art, and early screensavers spring to mind. More throwbacks are in evidence in Peake's large new installation piece, Stroud Green Road, a snaking row of low aluminium tables, cutting through the room like the titular thoroughfare does through Finsbury Park. Laid out on their polished shelves is an eclectic assortment of items: trays of congealed blue and pink jesmonite resin; hair gel; wiggling neon lights that mimic the shapes in Peake's paintings; an animal's bleached skull; a packet of Chewits. Some of them are from shops on the road itself. Speakers play low snatches of sound that Peake recorded and distorted as he revisited his old haunts; they mingle evocatively with Kool London's louder and more insistent beats.

This is not a reconstruction of a place or time. Peake's works may give more than a nod to eighties and nineties London but they are unmistakeably contemporary art. The paintings are carefully considered and well painted. Stroud Green Road is an exercise in the deliberately unfathomable symbolism popular right now among many leading artists. At the back of the room, a large piece, Testeen, reprises some more classical artistic themes. A floor-length, diaphanous white curtain screens off a small space accessible only by slipping between the hanging sheets. Projected onto the fabric are videos of men and women performing balletic routines on loop, and slides of Peake himself, naked in various postures alongside an image of an Old Master double-portrait. (There's a hint of Twin Peaks surrealism to these inscrutable characters and the curtained, floodlit setting Peake has created for them.)

This is a tour into Peake's head; a glimpse into the experiences of his life so far and the myriad ways that they bleed into his present work. As Peake puts it: 'There's often a sort of quest for identity in my work - and that, I think, is the staggeringly beautiful thing about being an artist. You are afforded the luxury of creating a space for yourself as an individual in the world.' To underscore this point, Peake himself will be physically present each day in the gallery (though he was not immediately apparent during my visit), undertaking a series of daily tasks and occupying various constructed spaces. Performing himself.

But what does this all mean for the visitor, wandering well-heeled off Bermondsey Street into a phantom Finsbury Park of the artist's remembering? What role do we serve in Peake's immersive self-portrait of sorts? Despite being invited onto his concrete pitch, there is a sense that we can only approach it obliquely, as outsiders - something I think Peake himself hints at in his construction of the space. Behind Kool London's booth is a second one, where Peake appears to have stashed various tools and props: a loudspeaker, twine, duct tape; a clown suit, a beaten up chaise-longue. The room in which they sit is partially walled off, and some of the objects can only be viewed by way of a carefully placed mirror. On one of the interior walls is a painting of two faces. Viewed from the window they look normal enough, but round the corner of the cabin a hole has been punched in the plasterboard exterior wall. If you look through that, you see the painting has been stretched and distorted in a perspectival trick made famous by Holbein's The Ambassadors in London's National Gallery. Things change, depending on where you arrive at them from.

Throughout this exhibition is a sense of Peake replaying aspects of his past on loop - picking them up and changing them slightly each time as he folds them productively into his art. It's a nice touch that, as you head towards the exhibition exit, you have the choice of entering a narrow unlit corridor that Peake has constructed around one edge of the room. It leads you right into the corner, and into the dark, only to turn and emerge again at the beginning, wondering whether to turn right and exit, or plunge back in and relive the past again.

By Maggie Gray.