The first stop on Matts Leider­stam’s Grand Tour is a telescope. Aimed through a cut-away in the gallery wall at what seems to be a dull view of a municipal car park. A look through the view­find­er­ reveals the pastoral landscape in the distance, tinted sepia.

You couldn’t ask for a clearer statement of intent. Leider­stam is in the business of looking, and looking again.

Then, im­me­di­ately, the waters are muddied - the next exhibit consists of pre­par­at­ory sketches for the mounting of this very ex­hib­i­tion, displayed alongside an in­ter­act­ive display of Grand Tour, the website, which ex­haust­ively cata­lo­gues the paintings, objects and texts the visitor is about to see. This meta-ex­hib­i­tion is more than a prelude; it is a signal that Leider­stam cannot stop looking, or asking others to look, always ready with another viewpoint, another in­ter­pret­a­tion, another layer.

The ex­hib­i­tion proper is then, fittingly, more like an archive, research centre or art history lab­or­at­ory than a show. High tables are arranged in rows. Each bears a selection of textbooks, paintings and slides, which are partnered with light-boxes, mag­n­i­fy­ing lenses and pro­ject­ors.

There are two key texts for students of this Grand Tour, both published in 1996 but, at first glance, with little else in common: Grand Tour - The Lure of Italy in the Eight­eenth Century and Spartacus In­ter­n­a­tion­al Gay Guide.

Having already shown us that first glances are not enough, Leider­stam seeks to draw these two guide­books together, mag­n­i­fy­ing details, decoding symbols, and re-encoding them, until the gen­tle­man­ly 18th Century quest for erudition is par­al­leled with a con­tem­por­ary quest for knowledge of a more carnal kind. At times, the twinning of grand tourist and sex tourist is less than subtle. In After George Hamilton, a mag­n­i­fy­ing glass is placed over a re­pro­duc­tion of that artists’ The 8th Duke of Hamilton with Dr. John Moore and Ensign Moore, crudely enlarging the bunched cloth at the Duke’s crotch.

In After Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the Spartacus guidebook lies beside a re­pro­duc­tion of Piranesi’s Piazza Della Rotunda With The Pantheon, open at a page detailing the cruising hotspots of Rome. A mag­n­i­fy­ing glass is aimed squarely at a group of men in the fore­ground of the painting, and, in­ev­it­ably, they appear to be men seeking men.

If Leider­stam continued in this vein, his Grand Tour would be little more than a suc­ces­sion of sight gags, quick quips to queer art history with a simple, repeated act of jux­ta­pos­i­tion. Thank­fully, his paintings go further than his ar­range­ments of books and lenses.

After Robert Hubert foregoes en­lar­ge­ment in favour of al­ter­a­tion. Hubert’s The Painter’s Studio is copied, but where the original shows the artist at work, firmly focussed on the bust he is sketching, Leider­stam’s copy shows him gazing out at the viewer. After Nicholas Poussin includes copies of Landscape with a Man scooping Water from a Stream and Landscape with Traveller’s Resting, both with figures that turn away in the original twisting around to meet the viewer’s gaze in the reworking.

Here Leider­stam is posing questions about looking, about the male gaze, about the in­ter­pret­a­tion inherent in the act of copying. But, in the wake of the jokey jux­ta­pos­ing comes another crack - these lads are, in the in­ter­n­a­tion­al language of the cruising ground, making eye contact, and they aren’t after learned con­ver­sa­tion about the paintings they inhabit.

The deft touches of humour sugar the medicine of other, more elaborate acts of copying and revision. Claude Lorraine’s Landscape With Rebekah taking Leave of her Father is here in re­pro­duc­tion twice over. The second iteration shows an X-ray of the canvas that reveals a moonlit scene beneath the sunny surface. Leider­stam, of course, copies the moon.

It is at this point that the Grand Tour becomes dizzying. Leider­stam shows us copies of paintings left behind at cruising spots from the pages of Spartacus, pho­to­graphed and added to the archive. He projects a pho­to­graph of a copy of a painting standing beside the original onto a maquette of the room they are pho­to­graphed in. He shows a slideshow of filtered images of the Per­th­shire coun­tryside behind re­pro­duc­tions of Alexander Naysmith’s Castle Huntly, Per­th­shire. Next to the Naysmith, a set of Claude Glasses - tinted lenses to aid the landscape painter, adding at­mo­sphere to a plain view - lie atop a light box. With this steady mania for layering of modes and methods of seeing and looking, matched with a studied com­pul­sion to seek out symbols, or create them when they cannot be found, Leider­stam proves his thesis.

After taking this Grand Tour, it is beyond doubt that the past grand tourist and present-day thrill-seeker are one and the same. But it is a slippery proof, one that rests on re-training the viewer’s eye to match Leider­stam’s in­tro­spect­ive in­spec­tion of art history through the lens of con­tem­por­ary gay culture; an optical illusion based on allusion.