“Did you manage to find us without too much trouble?” asks Jamie Byrom, head of sales at the Hannah Barry gallery. The question has a slightly different resonance than if we were standing in, say, Cork Street. But then a gallery in Cork Street probably wouldn’t have the privilege of sharing a huge building with the Holy Order of Cherubim and Seraphim Movement Church.

“We get wonderful music and singing to accompany the art every Sunday,” says Jamie.

Sited in an old warehouse on a Peckham industrial estate the Hannah Barry gallery is main base for 25-year-old Hannah, an art entrepreneur who must harbour considerable reserves of energy and determination in her slight frame. Since organising her first exhibition in Peckham in 2006 she has built up a group of more than 20 young artists who seem to work in every kind of medium from oil paint to MDF.

Jamie leads me into the soaring gallery space – “acres of space for a fraction of the price you’d pay in the West End” – to take a look at the current exhibition of work by Viktor Timofeev. Timofeev is one of those international mavericks whose CV inspires exhaustion in more plodding personalities. Born in Riga, Latvia, he studied in New York and now lives and works in Berlin.

Timofeev’s exhibition at Hannah Barry takes its title – LOCAL_AREA_NETWORKS(s) – from a term “describing a cluster of connected computer nodes” and is “influenced by progressive architecture, utopian community and skateboarding ideology”. Being sedate – OK lazy – I’m not sure I’m going to get the skateboarding vibe.

One of the things Timofeev does is play with perspective and pattern. Using very simple elements like crosses or Y and V shapes – the fork in the road or tree branch – he creates the kind of patterns which usually form a backdrop to our lives but sometimes spring out and more or less crack us over the head.

Strolling along Timofeev’s pattern wall we pass from tyre tracks to a wire link fence, or perhaps a pool of water shattered by a stone, to a herd of black crosses gathered round a white void. Within one step we seem to have gone from the pattern being a mere accessory to a total explanation of a scene – to me at least those crosses and the void are shorthand for death and a whole variety of complicated funeral scenes and rituals.

Timofeev’s patterns grow into landscapes, provisional looking collections of skips, metal girders and Portakabins often trapped in and held together by complicated webs of rope that have no beginning and no end. In one image, Trebucht_Smke, a collection of jazzy beach umbrellas blooms near a slab of overgrown concrete – St Tropez meets Detroit.

My favourite picture and Jamie’s too goes by the cryptic title LPZG_84 (see above). Our reaction to the teetering arch of Portakabins painted with a rainbow is a nice illustration of the diverse ways in which art ‘gets’ people. Jamie points out how the rainbow’s “golden triangle” draws the eye to the cabin in the foreground, with its interior walls looking as though they’ve been carefully wallpapered. For some strange reason the stacked up cabins remind me of the notorious Victory Arch in Baghdad that was modelled on Saddam Hussein’s forearms. It’s a picture of a place flattened, trying to rebuild itself and not quite sure which dreams to make solid.

Having taken the Peckham Pavilion to the Venice Biennale last year Hannah is still fizzing with ideas. London, she thinks, “definitely has space for a major new gallery”. This spring she will show work from a selection of New York artists whilst working on a plan to open a gallery in NY with the aim of examining “how the US sees Europe and how Europe sees the US”. In this post 9/11 world that sounds like a project with interesting artistic and political ramifications.

Image: LPZG_84, acrylic on canvas © Viktor Timofeev