Evans is a place on Earth: The Proposition.

A truck, a penknife, shoes, chairs, cargo ships, and lots and lots and lots of empty drinking glasses. These are the quotidian ingredients of White Cube, Bermondsey's recent The Real:Three Propositions exhibition and if that sounds about as exciting as the incredibly dull name the show's been given then that's a pity. I dare say attendance was low but those who did go, and it wouldn't have cost you a single penny, were treated to some of the finest figurative art of the last few decades.

The three contributing artists (Konrad Klapheck, Des Lawrence, and Peter Dreher) all use, the free information sheet you pick up from the desk on the way in tell us, "precise, lucid, figurative styles to depict people, places and things" and you can hardly argue with that somewhat workaday precis of the show.

The first room you enter is given over to Klapheck, an octogenarian from Dusseldorf who's been influenced by both the German New Objectivity movement and Pop Art. While the penknife in Der Misanthrop is rendered very clearly and honestly, more recent works like Im Zeitralter der Gewalt II are more suffused with bright colour and elongated shapes. The loader filling the tipper is almost anthropomorphic in its depiction. It'd be easy to imagine it with a face, chatting away as if a member of Bob the Builder's team. Albeit a slightly disturbing one.

Konrad Klapheck - Im Zeitralter der Gewalt II (A l'age de la violence II) (1995)

Konrad Klapheck - Lamento No 11 (1995)

Konrad Klapheck - Der Misanthrop (1971)

Klapheck's room won't detain you long. Nice though his art is the White Cube don't seem to have much of it. That's not true for Des Lawrence. Lawrence is more than thirty years younger than the two German artists he's exhibiting with/up against. Born in Wiltshire in 1970 he's clearly grown up in a more celebrity obsessed age and his enamels and pencil drawings are inspired by newspaper obituaries.

When a notable person dies (and if, presumably, it takes Lawrence's fancy) he sets about making a portrait of them - but not using their face. Or even their body. Instead, he has, in great detail, made a picture of an object or an image that the recently deceased had been associated with.

I've no idea who Chahine Yavroyan or Wanda Ferragamo are but I could probably have saved myself a Google search to find out that Chahine was a lighting designer and Wanda was a shoemaker by just looking at Lawrence's shiny work. I knew Rudy Von Gelder was a recording engineer specialising in jazz and I think we all know who Christine Keeler was but that's not necessarily the important thing when considering Lawrence's work.

They're touching tributes, sure, but, more so, they're great standalone pieces of art. I was particularly taken with the container boat in Arnold Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller and there's further nautical nuance in David Armitage. Perhaps I just like boats and ships and have missed my vocation, wasting my life as a land lubber when it should have been a sailor's life for me after all. No jokes about being seasick on the Serpentine, thankyou.

I also like Frank Schirrmacher (journalist and co-publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) and Christine Keeler and that's not just because I like women in swimsuits and interesting fonts displayed on windows but also because Des Lawrence has rendered them with clear affection. The fact he pays such attention to detail, and makes everything look so damned impossibly good, shows that these memorials come from the heart. Even if Lawrence, in all likelihood, had no personal relationship with the subjects whatsoever.

Des Lawrence - Chahine Yavroyan (2019)

Des Lawrence - Wanda Ferragamo (2019)

Des Lawrence - Jens Risom (2018)

Des Lawrence - Christine Keeler (2019)

Des Lawrence - George Martin (2016)

Des Lawrence - Arnold Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller (2014)

Des Lawrence - Frank Schirrmacher (2015)

Des Lawrence - Nancy Roman (2019)

Des Lawrence - David Armitage (2018)

Des Lawrence - Rudy Van Gelder (2019)

It's possible to feel emotional about people you don't know and it's even possible to have feelings about inanimate objects. Peter Dreher is the most ascetic of the triumvirate of contributors to The Real:Three Propositions. So austere is his 'muse' it borders on the monastic. Every day, since 1974, Peter Dreher has drawn an empty drinking glass.

It's a work of lunatic scholarship yet in devoting his life to such a muse he echoes Morandi and Kawara and pre-empts the empty promises of the mindfulness trend. It's a treat to witness his work but I would not wish to live his life. Ain't the world funny?