Don’t: Camille Henrot review – surreal sexual psychodrama for the digitally overwhelmed

Testicles have faces and a fox licks a phallus as the French artist mixes online anxiety, family life and saucy erotica in works charged with meaning

Camille Henrot used to deal with the vast and unknowable. She used to ask the big questions. Who are we? Where do we come from? Why do we do what we do? Her 2014 show at the Chisenhale in London was about the origins of humanity and Darwinism, and her film Grosse Fatigue is about the creation of the universe. But in her latest work, the French artist has turned towards the introspective, the quiet, small and mundane.

Here in this little private museum on a mews, the one-time winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale has done away with the hypercomplex, ultra-ambitious chaos of her installations and films. Instead, she has pared back, gone minimal and taken a long, hard look at herself.

In the show, which is called Don’t, there are two bodies of work: a series of layered paintings, and a set of drawings on paper. The paintings are striated, hectic digital abstracts, each one a fusion of screenshots, collaged paper and real human brushstrokes – part-analogue experimentation, part-Photoshop manipulation. There are pages taken from etiquette guides copied and pasted over each other, little globs of paint obscuring the words, error messages from photo apps scribbled over with angry pen marks.

You lose yourself trying to figure out what’s digital and what’s analogue, what’s real and what’s just stuff that happens on your laptop. The series is called Dos and Don’ts, as if Henrot is trying to parse what is acceptable and what’s not in society, trying to make sense of what rules she is supposed to follow.

The paintings work best on a more personal level. There are photos of her husband and kids collaged into one work, an X-ray of her wrist in another, while hiding behind digital doodles in the best painting is a screenshot of a bill for the storage of oocytes (eggs preserved for IVF treatment). These aren’t just explorations of societal rules and restrictions, they are visual diaries, portraits of the private self, inquiries into how to navigate the digital world when you are overwhelmed and stressed. The post-internet digital aesthetic is great, but it’s this deeply personal excavation of the everyday and mundane that makes them more than just pretty digital paintings.

The drawings need no untangling or interpreting: this is a world of mythical beasts and saucy erotica. Hybrid creatures rut and thrust in simple line drawings, part-pig, part-man, part-donkey, part-woman. Testicles have human faces, mad-eyed foxes lick an ejaculating phallus, women have penises. It’s all a surreal sexual psychodrama, a vision of private desires erupting out of the page. You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to figure out that this whole show is an unapologetic window into Henrot’s everyday life, and you can’t make an accurate portrait of everyday life without including some very raunchy moments of total physical abandon.

While these works aren’t as good as Henrot’s installations and films, they do serve a purpose. They ask: what’s left once you’ve chucked out the grand gestures and the big questions? For Henrot, it’s the tentative, awkward, loving, horny, boring, mundane stuff of the everyday – the stuff of life at its most basic.

• At the Perimeter, London, until 25 July.