The post card invitation to Andrew Nicholls exhibition at the Verge features a section from one of his collage drawings, a slightly bulging boy drawn in that peculiar Edwardian style of cross hatching that first became popular at the end of the nineteen sixties along with Alice in Wonderland and guards’ uniforms. Pandora-like the boy opens a box, musical perhaps, there emerges a tonal photographic version of a muscled male torso surrounded by all sorts of fantasies swirls doodles and cartoon slogans.

The boy acts like an automaton, his inflated features, his bulging, innocent eyes reminiscent of old fashioned china dolls but surely the pressure that stiffens his skin is more erectile - a excess of love, swollen sentiment, has corroded his consciousness, floated him off like a barrage balloon. - The guy needs a diet to bring him down, less sentiment more blood.

Nicholls concedes that his chief concern is Sentiment, with a capital S, in his title "Love Andrew Nicholls." Assuming our artist is not unbearably alone in life, we take this as a greeting, not a plea for help, an offer to share around some of his excess emotion. In Australia this excretory function is usually performed by sports stars and those ghastly television freaks in blazers who milk them for every drop of faked up feeling they can get.

Nicholls has noticed this. The back wall of the Verge front gallery is covered top to bottom with a transcription, in thin blue wash, of a photo of two swimming heroes grinning up from the end of the pool. Perhaps I should be made to tell you who they are but I couldn’t give a stuff and neither should you. The point is that we are all expected, coerced even, to generate sentimental vomit, ejaculate a huge gob of damp joy - a bit like baboons showing their blue bums - at anything to do with sport.

In Australia, sport was never the province of a nineteenth century industrial working class. It was and remains the supreme vehicle for the reactionary eighteenth century attitudes to the emotions and ambitions brought here by those born to rule. That’s why Little Johnny Howard, another doll currently over inflated by sentiment, can win brownie points just for going to the footy.

Nicholls blue wash links his image to the willow pattern and other eighteeenth artefacts of sentiment. There is a tilting door in the middle of the mural which can be lifted with a blue and white ceramic knob to reveal an unlit storage area which echos with the sound of gurgling liquid - sentiment flushed down the drain perhaps?

On the right wall, the effect is reinforced in a work with four small monochrome squares in spangled glitter and one painted version of a blue and white tile with staffage figures and a dog wobbling on the edge of a river. Desire and sentiment are by no means reconcilable. You can sink your teeth and other anatomical details into a field of glitter using one crude metaphor. It requires conspiratorial consent, with well wrought bad faith, to penetrate a carefully constructed sentimental landscape.

The opposite wall amplifies the thesis through style and history. Nicholls has cast a set of broken twisted frames in plaster and stuck them direct to the wall so that they appear as part of it, a kind of cancerous growth unique to art galleries. The space within these frames leaks onto the surface of wall beyond through their broken openings. This is also a late baroque device, born from Michelangelo’s broken pediments and repeated through a thousand garden grottos in which the instability of art and life was recycled as a visual conceit - another version of the triumph of sentiment over desire, ruinous age over priapic passion

It seems a shame to put anything in these derelict, dysfunctional spaces - blank, flat, white plaster would have been enough. Any image in there must bleed away to nothing. Nicholls decided to fill each one. Several have line crawings stuck direct to the wall One shows two skeletons conversing - joined by the femur - a direct derivation from baroque tombs. Another, far more fascinating, is filled with paisley patterned wrapping paper - some of it printed on reflective metal foil. It has no formal or logical relation to the broken frame, but the rhythmic, brutish chaos of its pattern, rolling left to right, achieves an extraordinary presence. Do you feel lucky ? Can you make Nicholls’ day? What’s it to be sentiment, desire, or both?

Baroque sentimentality was first proposed as a key aspect of contemporary art in New York about a decade ago, in the backwash of the Warhol eighties. It would be possible to read this show as entirely unoriginal, the latest attempt to make work guaranteed by an international script. Clearly there is more to it. Nicholls may have drifted unaware, merely by tracing the landscape, into his cringing critique of our local condition, but his work shows what a powerful resource it could become. We need more art that makes use of it to deal with immediate experience - the reality that "is" as Little Johnny, Fat Kim and their cohorts would have it. Take the tale of the asylum seekers, the perfect parable of sentiment and desire, with bad faith slathered around all over the place. Something not too far away from Nicholls’ practice, might, eventually, help our great suburban herds form a more accurate understanding of their own interests.