Possibly due to its close proximity to the grand edifices of the University of London, the private view of Erica Eyres' show at the Bloomsbury-based Rokeby Gallery had a distinctly scholarly air. Take my exchange with one clever-looking chap in square spectacles...

Chap: What do you do?
Me: I'm a writer (mostly of essays, so technically true).
Chap: I'm a lecturer of French and Russian.
Me: Gosh.
Chap: (Something incomprehensible in French)
Me: (long pause, tumbleweed passes, etc) Oui.

And all this intellectual stuff is kind of ironic because Eyres’ show is one of the strangely visceral you'll see all year.

There are certain media that are probably only ever used by adolescent girls, and ballpoint pen and coloured pencil rank high among them. Lucian Freud won't ever display a new series of works in Caran D'ache. Likewise, it's improbable that Frank Auerbach will abandon oils for biros. They do not scream 'This is Art'. Eyres, however, embraces the associations of these almost apologetically workaday media to produce some uncomfortably familiar representations of female identity.

At first sight the Canadian-born Eyres’ drawings of ethereal waifs are the stuff of much contemporary fashion illustration. You know the thing: wispy fringes, big eyes, coyly downturned chins; a bit sixties, a bit Sara Moon, a bit nothing. You can practically see the Topshop labels on these girls' smock dresses. But on closer inspection (and it really is closer inspection, Eyres is so clever that nothing jumps out at first), you see their features have been gently, lovingly, devastatingly manipulated. The blotches and craters of their skin have been unsparingly detailed, their incardinate lips are grotesquely downturned as if grimacing children; their low-slung jeans creep beneath the pubic bone. And the worst of it is: these pitiful girl-children don't realize how absurd they appear. They pose for the viewer in the attitudes of provocation, intensifying the pathos to levels that are both heartbreaking and comedic.

As I edged towards the well-stocked bar following my woeful attempt to impress my Francophone friend (whom I spotted later that evening similarly intimidating the gallery director) it struck me: what's Eyres’ work is about is our universal terror, despite all our pretences, and all our fancy clothes, of looking a little bit stupid.