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The Triumph of Painting

The good, the bad and the ugly

Richard Dorment, daily Telegraph

Art collector Charles Saatchi has a new enthusiasm – painting. But, frustratingly, his latest show juxtaposes the great with the inconsequential, says Richard Dorment.

Charles Saatchi is to art collecting what drift nets are to fishing. In his trawls through the art galleries of the world he casts his net so wide that he can't help but land the biggest and the best. But, in a typical Saatchi haul, the significant hangs side by side with the inconsequential, and a lot of work that initially looks fresh soon goes off.

In a widely publicised interview last year, he criticised the Tate for not buying young artists when they can be bought cheap. That wasn't fair. A public collection can't afford to make the mistakes a private collector can, and the scale of his collection means that Saatchi makes more mistakes than most.

We hear about his winners – Hirst, Ofili and the Chapmans – but what about all those artists in his Sensation show we've never seen again?

Saatchi's real genius is not as a collector but as a curator. No one in the art world has the ability to make an exhibition look as good as he can, no one has his flair for the quirky juxtaposition that makes us see a work of art in all its complexity.

His latest enthusiasm is painting. There is a lot of it around, but you don't necessarily notice it because the art that has caught the public imagination tends to be staged outside the art gallery – in performance and in installation-sculpture.

I'm thinking of the great orange sun at Tate Modern, most Turner prize nominees or almost anything sponsored by Artangel. But Saatchi is right. Painting isn't going away, and to prove the point he's staging a three-part show featuring 56 painters.

The opening show is designed to show the varieties and possibilities of contemporary painting. The six well-established artists in it belong to an older generation. Their work inspires the young artists we'll see in the next two instalments of the exhibition.

Saatchi's method of collecting makes any other generalisation about this show impossible. It is hard for me to understand, for example, what someone who admires Luc Tuymans sees in the work of Peter Doig (and vice versa). If there is an element of discrimination in his holdings of Jörg Immendorff, it wasn't apparent to me. But then diversity and contradiction are part of the show's point.

The two artists I most admire in this show are South African Marlene Dumas and Belgian Luc Tuymans. Both use paint to say things that can't be said in any other medium.

At first it is difficult to put your finger on what, precisely, is so wrong with the neatly dressed and carefully groomed child whom Dumas paints on a monumental scale in the close-up format reminiscent of a conventional studio photograph. But the little boy is unhappy and fearful. He has the old face of one who is not loved. Then you notice the bruises on his lips and nose.

The picture depicts physical abuse, made all the more upsetting by the gentility of the family it takes place in. Dumas has the rare ability to show us what the people she paints are thinking, their interior life and intelligence.

Compared with the other artists in the show, Tuymans "does" the least – and asks the most of the viewer. In a monumental still life in which he pays homage to Cézanne, he minimises tonal contrasts so that simple forms and restrained colours emerge imperceptibly out of a luminous grey-blue background. The result is at once understated and exalted. Painted in response to September 11, the sublime calm of the picture says: hold on, be silent and trust in unchanging things.

You can see exactly why Saatchi starts the show with a gallery full of work by the Canadian-born painter Peter Doig. Since Doig doesn't have an idea in his head, his landscapes would suffer terribly if you came upon them after seeing artists of real depth, such as Dumas or Tuymans.

It is not one single thing that I dislike about Doig's art, but everything – textures, colours, surface, tone and subject matter. The closer you get to one of his paintings, the more repellent the handling of the paint becomes.

Look at the landscape showing an aqua-blue canoe on a yellow-green lake, sandwiched between a skein of scary trees at the top of the picture and a black fence below.

Everything about the picture feels phoney to me: the portentous subject, the intensified colours, and the way Doig manipulates the viewer so that only one response – the mock-schlock-horror of Twin Peaks – is possible. Doig leaves no place for us to bring our own questions, emotions or interpretations to his pictures. Like the director of a B-movie, he does it all for us.

And that, pretty much, is what leaves me indifferent to the art of Jörg Immendorff, a German neo-expressionist whom I last thought about in the 1980s. Immendorff was never a lyrical or beautiful artist. He bludgeons us over the head with his noisy, over-excited and monstrously sized canvases, all of which are self-pitying, if comical, cries of anguish for the plight of the figurative painter (i.e. himself) in the late 20th century. As if we care.

In the same rotunda, Saatchi shows an artist whom I'm pretty sure would have agreed with every word I've written about Immendorff – the late Martin Kippenberger.

Kippenberger was a joker whose work is light in spirit and lighter still in touch. Some of his jokes were good ones, too – such as buying a petrol station in Brazil and re-naming it after a Nazi war criminal, or using a painting by Gerhard Richter as a coffee table.

Kippenberger was essentially a conceptual artist. Like Gavin Turk, the bewildering number of styles and techniques he uses spoofs the marketing of art and the mechanics of both celebrity and of art history.

Paris Bar, for example, shows the interior of the Berlin restaurant where Kippenberger covered the walls with his own work and with that of his friends. This monumentally dull painting functions as a shameless act of self-promotion, conferring on an unknown "school" of art an instant historical context, an instant history.

I can't say that Kippenberger's art rings many bells for me, but his influence, as we will see in coming shows, was enormous.

One of the qualities I most admire in Saatchi is his ability to think outside the loop. In this exhibition he's showing a group of splatter paintings by the Austrian Hermann Nitsch, who is famous for staging orgiastic spectacles in which the bodies of young men and women are ritually smeared with blood, food and the entrails of slaughtered animals.

I hadn't quite realised that Nitsch's sadomasochistic orgies provide the raw materials for paintings in which red paint is flung, spattered, poured and dripped onto canvases.

You simply can't get away from the absolute sincerity of these works. They look like bandages, veils of blood, or walls for a firing squad to aim at. It's as though they carry in them traces of the extreme emotions under which they were created. Nitsch's performances bore me rigid. His paintings are electrifying.

Of all the artists in the show, only Dumas and Tuymans lay paint on canvas in a complex and satisfying way. It is ironic that in a show called The Triumph of Painting, what really makes their art powerful is the way they think.

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