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The Triumph of Painting

Violence, perversity and sadistic genius

Richard Dorment, daily Telegraph

Charles Saatchi's latest exhibition of modern painters reveals some dazzling work by new German artists, says Richard Dorment.

In the second instalment of Charles Saatchi's three-part show The Triumph of Painting, we are introduced to six painters, five of them German, who are the spiritual offspring of the late Martin Kippenberger, a joker and conceptual artist who used painting to mock the pieties of the art world and to undermine the certainties of art history.

Other than that, the only thing I can see that these artists have in common is that they all believe painting to be a language as eloquent and as versatile as any of the other means of expression available to them.

The show starts and ends with a wallop - two galleries hung with the work of Düsseldorf and New York-based artist Dirk Skreber. What a painter. Don't be put off by the fact that one of his best pictures is a monumentally-scaled aerial view over the roofs and parking lot of a suburban shopping mall.

At once abstract and representational, the picture holds you transfixed. As soon as you have figured out what you are looking at, your eye reduces the buildings to a series of volumetric squares, trapezoids and triangles. These appear to sit, like sculptures in low relief, on a flat ground consisting of diagonally slanted near-monochrome bands of subdued colour.

Step up close, and you see how sensuously Skreber lays his palette of brown, silver, grey, and blue over every inch of the painting. Yet, despite the rich paint surface, these pictures are dream-like, silent, frozen in time: it is as though we are looking at a surveillance tape that can record what it sees, but has no ability to react emotionally to it.

Later in the show I felt the same sense of palpable excitement in front of the work of Kai Althoff, a young painter living in Cologne who creates relatively small-scale narrative pictures in paint, watercolour, pencil and collage.

Althoff draws the human figure with the preternaturally sensitive line of Beardsley, the sensual self-absorption of Schiele and the moral decadence of Georg Grosz. The dandies, soldiers, saints, degenerates and thugs who haunt his imagination might have stepped out of the pages of one of Arthur Rackham's fairy tale illustrations.

With a palette of khaki green, brown, grey, flesh tones and black, one watercolour shows two Nazi storm troopers in a forest of silver birch beating and stripping a helpless old man. A jigsaw of interlocking colours and shapes, the composition is so tight it feels as though the page can't contain it. The paradox is that Althoff draws an act of violence and perversity in lines so delicate they seem to hover and tremble over the page, and with a detached wit you just don't see in art any more.

Deliberately ugly and badly painted, Albert Oehlen's work is closest in spirit to Kippenberger's. Computer generated, and incorporating collaged photographic and printed elements, all his paintings take elements from very different pictorial traditions and bung them together so that nothing quite "works", and the viewer is left without a way to pigeonhole or categorise what he is looking at.

The purpose is to expose the deep grooves in which our minds run when looking at paintings, by creating works that we cannot mentally process. This is surprisingly hard for an artist to do, because for 2,000 years our brains have been programmed to make sense out of the visual world.

In Black Rationality, skeletons of horses are painted against a sloppy parody of an "abstract expressionist" background. It is not that naturalism and abstraction can't work together, but that here the viewer is left eternally frustrated, unable to find a visual resolution between the two styles or to come up with a coherent reason for their juxtaposition. As an art historian, this kind of thing drives me crazy, but at the same time I recognise that Oehlen is a kind of sadistic genius.

Then there is Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal, who paints everything from a suicide bomber's belt to the image of a female agricultural worker taken out of a film of Soviet propaganda in the same relentless, deadpan, emotionless style. Warhol, Katz, Tuymans and Dumas: we have seen so much of this kind of thing, and, except for the eastern European twist, I don't see that Sasnal really adds much that's new to what is now a long-established genre.

Thomas Scheibitz showed in the German pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale and underwhelmed the entire world with his updatings of the high modernist aesthetic. Here, his knowing deconstructions of Cézanne, Braque, Mondrian and Albers are casually painted in nasty industrial colours and carefully avoid any shape or form that might give aesthetic pleasure.

Part of the point is that Scheibitz can turn his hand to any style, reduce it down to its basic components, and make what was magical look dead simple. Call me an elitist, but I simply don't understand why this artist is so highly regarded.

Finally, there are Berlin-based artist Franz Ackermann's paintings, accurately described in one label as "trippy postcards from the edge".

One of the best, showing an aerial view of a helicopter descending on to a landscape, has the dizzying, swirling dynamism of one of Robert Delaunay's Futurist paintings of the Eiffel Tower. The blades of the whirlybird are formed by a concentric circle of bright, interlocking colours that the eye reads as being close to the picture plane. Solid forms on the earth far below are painted a uniform blue, and so function as either background (if you read the picture as abstract) or as subject (if you see it as a landscape).

Ackermann's combination of the exuberant superficiality of Pop Art with the dynamism of Futurism packs a visual punch, but has to be taken in small doses.

I don't expect to like all the artists Charles Saatchi comes up with. But here he has introduced me to six of whom I'd like to see four again, and two I think first rate. Not bad at all.

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