Damien Hirst’s latest show opens today in a functioning Anglican church in London. All Hallows on the Wall, once a haven for holy anchorites and medieval pilgrims, becomes the latest hangout for the bad boy of Brit Art. Has the prodigal son returned? Or is he exploiting religious imagery for the sake of controversy?

A few potentially provocative pieces go on display. Traditional religious symbols are subjected to a Post-Modern makeover. Here is the Holy Spirit descending in a haze of formaldehyde; a Sacred Heart cast in silver, sliced through with scalpels, bound about with barbed wire and embedded with razor blades; a cross jewelled with pharmaceuticals like precious gems; a communion host presented as a giant Paracetamol tablet.

Religion can be a risky touchpaper to light. And yet Hirst’s pieces are far less troubling than dozens of familiar church images. He translates the Crucifixion into a series of medically explicit photographs of bloody wounds and surgical procedures.

This is a great deal less harrowing than Grönewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, for instance, in which a putrefying Christ is presented in all his contorted agony for the comfort of plague victims.

Hirst’s Skull Beneath the Skin, a screenprint of gleaming bone and bared, diamond-dusted teeth, seems perfectly at home amid the memento mori of tombs. And besides, when you think about it, what could possibly be more disturbing than all that traditional religious mythology: those bloody Crucifixions of a betrayed Saviour, those grisly martyrs, all griddled, racked and boiled?

Four years ago, Hirst tackled the subject of the Last Supper in an installation involving bloody tangles of rubber tubing and butchered cattle heads. It had all the subtlety of a bull (or 12 bulls) in a chemist’s shop. He tried to bludgeon his subject into submission, and it was a mess.

Now he adopts a more measured approach. In these almost understated artworks, he asks us to consider the similarities between religion and science. Is faith just a drug? Do you swallow Jesus like a tablet? Is doubt a side effect? Is art the new religion? They are not particularly radical questions, but Hirst finds a succinct visual language for them. His The Fate of Man, a cast of a child’s skull, new teeth lined up in the gums waiting for the baby teeth to fall out, has a haunting resonance. His altarpiece, a triptych of tropical butterflies floating against a cerulean sky, has an uplifting loveliness — or at least it has at first glance: then you think of the trapped insects and their untimely end.

I wouldn’t go so far as to light a votive candle in homage to his vision. But Hirst finds a fresh — and sometimes funny — way to present his questions. This show is not gratuitously provocative, and even the most faithful would find it hard to muster outrage. When I visited, there was little to trouble the peace. It took a City of London bureaucrat, distressed by the advertising poster that had been put up on a listed building, to register a complaint.

Until April 4: 07794 586203, www.wallspace.org.uk

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