The first thing you notice is the strong odor, which is somewhere just on the forgiving side of rank. Imagine the refrigeration breaking down for a couple of August days in a provincial French cheese shop, and the aromatic quickly turning miasmatic, andyou'll begin to get an idea of just how the Rontgen Kunstraum contemporary art gallery is smelling right now.

The reason for this is a German artist named Wolfgang Stiller, 39, or rather his room-filling installation and exhibition, "Industrial Deposits."

It isn't particularly difficult, of course, to fill up the Rontgen Kunstraum, which is quite possibly Tokyo's smallest art gallery. But Stiller has taken over the space in an inspired fashion, with a series of stalagmitelike wax objects that reach for the main exhibition room's ceiling. There are about 10 spires here, some rather resembling dishes stacked skillfully on the floor, others bringing to mind the dynamics of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

Looking in from the doorway, the vision is nothing less than "Journey to the Center of the Earth," eerie yet inviting, with that wonderful olfactory note coaxing the visitor ever further into the artist's ensemble of ambience. Stiller has covered the walls of the gallery with a thick coat of the same industrial wax to create soft stucco-style surfaces that cry out to be touched.

"I don't really care so much about the smell," said Stiller at his well-attended opening party. "Actually, the smell of wax was a sort of funny and unexpected result of the materials I use, but of course it has added something to the atmosphere and made the installation even more strange!"

There are also five boxes in the show, galvanized tin, glass-fronted objects measuring 32 x 58 x 15 cm. Into these Stiller has built variations on his wax constructions, made up of flat and textured wax surfaces. Some of the boxes also contain small stalagmites or stalactites.

Stiller says he first developed his interest in the forms he is now using when he was a child, and found himself exploring caves with his friends. He grew fascinated with the otherworldly mineral deposits, and when he got a bit older set out to re-create the far-out atmosphere because, the artist explains, he is "a bit of a hippie."

Stiller has been working with industrial materials for some time now, and his style has matured to the point where he can not only bring a natural, organic look and feel to the materials and to what he does with them, but also manipulate the way we perceive them.

"Most people think of wax as what candles are made of, something warm," says Stiller. "But what I am doing here is trying to create a cold atmosphere, like if you didn't clean your freezer for six months."

The impressive exhibition is rounded out by a series of ink on paper drawings, "Tribute to Hereafter."

These are 1999 works, 34 x 29 cm, line drawings, mostly, with themes such as skulls and coffins recurring. There are blotches of ink, and crudely applied gold foil as well. While the drawings are nice enough to look at, something in the air will probably pull you back into the room with those cheese towers.

Stiller first brought his work to Japan some seven years ago, when he showed at Rontgen owner Katsuya Ikeuchi's previous space, the RKI, which, curiously, was the largest gallery space in Tokyo at the time. Ikeuchi deserves credit for spotting Stiller and sticking with the quirky artist.

While we're on the topic, the Rontgen chief also should be congratulated on this year's exhibition schedule, which has been surprisingly good in featuring the likes of MK Kahne, Florian Claar and local favorite Isao Sato. While renovations done over the summer have more than doubled the Rontgen Kunstraum's total exhibition space to 28 sq. meters, the whole space is still only about the size of the restrooms at the ICC, proving that old cliche that sometimes the good things really do come in small packages.