Contemporary art - The electric colour and intricate outlines of Michael Craig-Martin's art dazzle Richard Cork with drama and questions

Drenching the exterior of the Milton Keynes Gallery with flamboyant magenta paint, Michael Craig-Martin announces his distinctive presence before we even explore inside. The building's box-like structure is now more a monumental Craig-Martin sculpture than a receptacle for art. Passers-by are arrested by its sheer retinal impact, and I watch with delight as a technician on a Niftylift administers the final, radiant coat.

Just in case anyone imagines that the dazzling exterior is his only exhibit, Craig-Martin suspends on its frontage a colossal image of a turquoise drawer. Open and expectant, it reminds us that a gallery is essentially a container. And the drawer's emptiness bears an intriguing resemblance to the bare walls of a room waiting to be enhanced by an artist's work.

The exhibition within could easily be an anticlimax after this resounding clarion call. But Craig-Martin makes sure that the very first space is, if anything, more compelling. From floor to ceiling, the lofty chamber is enlivened by an intricate tracery of black lines. They define the contours of everyday objects familiar from the artist's previous work. But never before has he made an installation from printed wallpaper, and its images gain immense pictorial tension from their contact with each other. Books, scissors, chairs, mobile phones and the other forms in his repertoire touch without ever interpenetrating. The overall impact could feel claustrophobic. But the paper's whiteness, resulting from Craig-Martin's sparing reliance on outlines, alleviates any threat of visual oppression.

The precision of Craig-Martin's linear web makes this still life seem the opposite of slapdash or accidental. And he provides relief from the profusion by extracting 11 of the images in single, richly coloured paintings. Each one projects from the wall with an almost sculptural presence. Looking at the tumbler of pale green water, I was reminded of the real glass of water perched on a high shelf in Craig-Martin's iconic work of 1973 - whose title claimed, with true conceptual bravado, that it was An Oak Tree. There is no such provocative claim this time. But the tumbler does threaten, like the objects in the other ten painted panels, to float away from its moorings and hang, unattached, in space. The richness of Craig-Martin's emblazoned colour, so unlike the austerity of his Oak Tree, is all the more potent when set against the cool restraint of the monochrome wallpaper behind.

The next surprise awaits us through the door. Here Craig-Martin, the master of still life, devotes a whole room to radical reworkings of two supreme figure paintings in western art: Piero della Francesca's Flagellation and Georges Seurat's Bathers. After wallpaper filled with buckets, forks, shoes and light bulbs, this concentration on clothed and semi-naked bodies seems a momentous departure. But then, by degrees, we realise how very still these figures are. Although Christ is being whipped in Piero's painting, the scourging is strangely frozen. And it takes place in a chamber removed from the foreground, where three far larger, statuesque figures appear equally transfixed by the tragedy enacted behind them. The same profound sense of arrested motion prevails in Seurat's painting. Even the boy in the water, who lifts both hands to his mouth as if to blow or shout, is as composed as the figures on a classical frieze.

In this respect, both those great European images are close to the stillness in Craig-Martin's art. They also make us appreciate that he focuses, time and again, on objects redolent of human use. Although nobody is detectable in most of his work, an unseen human presence can be felt in all of it. So his decision to choose Piero and Seurat is understandable after all. One version of the Flagellation suffuses much of the composition in deep blue, so that everyone seems overcast by Christ's suffering. But Jesus himself has a puce body, and he stands on a floor so fiercely red that we wonder if his naked feet can bear the heat. In another version, the three figures in the foreground are painted in the palest of pinks, so that they look fragile and almost spectral. Their green and yellow hands stand out eerily, striking up a forceful choreography of their own.

A decision to turn Seurat's river vehement orange is equally provocative. Along with the brilliant yellow cleft in the bank, it gives the whole image a parched air. Northern France has become strangely overheated. As for the distant trees, they are transformed into phantasms rearing on a horizon where the lime exterior of the factory sounds an acid note. Craig-Martin injects this grave, meditative panorama with an unpredictable range of emotions. And they, in turn, alert us to the tensions underlying his apparently calm, measured paintings in the final room of his Milton Keynes exhibition.

Because everything appears so ordered and immaculate in these still-life images, viewers might be tempted to conclude that they are simply serene. After a while, however, their true emotional power becomes clear. In Biding Time (Red), we grow conscious of a metronome ticking away the seconds behind the bars of an electric fan. We wonder at the unaccountable oddness of the colossal safety pin, apparently poised to take a dive into a bucket. And we ponder the possible meaning of the bright white pills, scattered from an overturned bottle.

Craig-Martin is a supremely rigorous artist, and he provides no answers to the questions he raises. But they will not go away, and we will continue looking at his inexhaustible canvases in order to interrogate their mysteries all over again.

"Michael Craig-Martin: surfacing" is at the Milton Keynes Gallery (01908 676 900) until 21 November. A coinciding show of prints by the artist is at the Alan Cristea Gallery, London W1 (020 7439 1866) until 23 October

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