Pairs of glass sheets, displayed like the open pages of books, sit on little stands low on the floor, each accompanied by an ultraviolet tube where the book’s spine should be, whose glare picks up the image of a 1950s sci-fi monster printed on the glass pages. The light will damage your eyes if you look too long.

The room is lit by a cold blue glow, like the darkroom in a nightclub. The UV light makes your teeth fluoresce. The creature is based on an early book jacket illustration for John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. The creature has a bulbous hairy body, reminiscent of a pair of testicles on stubby legs, from which emanates a sturdy hollow stalk with a questing, plant-like stinger. The sexual connotations are unavoidable. The elements sit on the floor in a circle, like a study group in a madrasa. The elements are connected by various wires, and at the unapproachable centre of the circle sits a jumbled heap of protective eye-goggles.

Hamad Butt’s Transmission was made for his Goldsmiths’ College final degree show in 1990, and has always seemed to me to be at once ambitious and over-elaborated – often the way with student art, going too far to prove itself. But you have to risk being precocious to get anywhere. Transmission was originally accompanied by a glass-fronted noticeboard containing an arcane text printed on sugar-impregnated paper. Butt inserted maggots behind the glass, which would pupate and turn into flies that would eat the paper.

Not long after Butt showed his fly piece he had it destroyed after seeing a vitrine by Damien Hirst (who left Goldsmiths the previous year) called A Thousand Years, which contained live flies, a cow’s head and an insect-o-cutor, and was shown that same summer. Hirst had turned the life-cycle of the fly into a grim parable of life and death. It was dramatic and obvious in ways Butt’s work was sly and oblique.

Transmission was the first of the four works that made the artist’s name and on which his continuing reputation rests. Transmission was followed by a trio of singular yet interrelated objects, called Familiars, which were all completed by 1992. During the last two years of his life, Butt was unable to work. He died in 1994, aged 32, of Aids-related complications.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan; British-raised, queer and nominally Muslim, Butt’s art is now the subject of an exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, produced in conjunction with London’s Whitechapel Gallery, where the show will travel later next year. This is no rediscovery of a lost artist. From the first, Butt had his supporters. Now and again, the late British art critic Stuart Morgan would announce “I’ve just met this young artist. He’s a genius!”

Slung from wires in an exactly aligned row, three groups of identical sealed glass vessels, each one containing a greenish-yellow dilution of chlorine gas, dangle in mid-air, like a gigantic and dangerous version of Newton’s cradle, that desktop toy favoured by bored executives in the 1980s. Playing with Butt’s version would lead to calamity. Three curved steel tubes, bolted to the floor, arch towards one another above our heads, each tipped with a hollow glass prong filled with amber-tinted bromine. It has the air of some fiendish alien device cooked up for a cheapo sci-fi movie. I expect flickers of electricity to fizz between the prongs, but they don’t.

A vertical ladder, each rung a glass phial fitted with a heating element, instantly vaporising iodine powder into noxious reddish-purple haze, climbs the wall. The rungs of the ladder light up then dim in turn, taking the eye on a perilous ascent, the powder turning to gas instantly, without ever becoming a liquid, by a process called sublimation. Only a fool would attempt to climb the ladder.

Butt’s Familiars all seem to have a secret purpose. A mix of metaphor and alchemy, science and sculpture, their invitations are to be resisted. This, and the serious threat of danger, is part of their allure. What they are really about is potential, not least to hurt and to wound. Butt’s use of halogen chemicals – iodine, chlorine and bromine – all of which have both therapeutic or antiseptic uses as well as being carcinogenic or poisonous, mirrors the dangers of the chemicals used in early attempts to slow the progress of the Aids virus. Butt was diagnosed HIV positive in 1987, while caring for his partner.

Butt stood somewhat apart from the circus of media attention that followed his YBA peers at Goldsmiths. He wasn’t part of the gang. He worked slowly. His work demanded technical research and development, often in conjunction with chemists, scientific glass-blowers and specialised fabricators. His art wasn’t easily assimilated and it wasn’t market friendly. Complicated to install, to store and to move, and demanding commitment from those who wished to show it, Butt worked at a tangent to the overheated market. He found the scramble for the next big thing uncongenial and disruptive to his working practice.

In a typically wide ranging, insightful and waspish article in 1992, Morgan wrote of Butt’s “stealth”, saying, archly, that “Stephen Daedalus’s dictum ‘Silence, exile and cunning’ suited Butt down to the ground”. Leftfield references, in this case to James Joyce, were typical of Morgan’s approach. Butt’s sculptures (if that’s what they are) were first shown at London’s long defunct Milch Gallery, before being shown again at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton. In 1995, the year after Butt’s death, his Familiars were included in the Tate Gallery exhibition Rites of Passage, curated by Morgan and Tate curator Frances Morris, among a group of 11 artists, including Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Beuys. Butt was the youngest and least known participant.

Since his death, Butt’s Familiars and his Transmission have all entered Tate’s collection. Whatever threat and presence these sculptures once had has been contained in Dublin, where each of the Familiars is corralled-off and physically unapproachable. One cannot look at them in relation to one another. Their placement has little of the lowering sense of occasion and drama I remember from their installation in Rites of Passage.

That is almost it for Butt’s art, except that’s not it, as the exhibition in Dublin shows us. This is not a retrospective – too big a word for what Butt produced over barely a decade; career would be inappropriate too, as Butt hurtled toward his early death, an artist without long-term prospects. IMMA has reconstructed Butt’s fly-infested noticeboard, and fleshed-out the show with a paper trail of hand-written notes and sketches, typed-up pages, undated drawings and a portfolio of drypoint etchings, charcoal drawings and also a number of oil paintings, all made in the years before the artist found the way of working that made his name.

Butt spent much of the 1980s in and out of art school. He dropped out of one college and took advanced printmaking classes at others. He painted and etched and tried to find his voice, drawing and painting angular, sometimes joyous, mostly naked male figures in bathhouses. The figures were by turns sexy and anxious, cavorting and solitary. Glaring lightbulbs dangled, men adopted tortuous poses. All done much in the style of Picasso and Andre Masson, redone in the light of 1980’s neo-expressionism, I wish I liked them more. The paintings feel clogged and overworked.

He ditched all this soon after his return to Goldsmiths in 1987. Numerous later, undated drawings skirt symbolism and abstraction but add little. Of its time and out of time, Butt’s art remains strange, allusive and singular. He needed more time than he had. This too adds to the sense of an artist arrested in the middle of things, superimposing yet another reading to an already complex, truncated art.