Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is a creature of habit. For almost two decades he threepeated the animal-in-formaldehyde vitrines, his spotted or spun paintings and the pharmaceutical assemblages - ad nauseam and seemingly ad infinitum - only to stop them almost overnight. I for one, cheered this about-face, never mind whether it was for artistic, aesthetic or philosophical reasons. Hell, he didn't need the money.

Hirst's headlong dive into paint was not exactly starting from zero, though. He's still an in-demand, world-famous artist and many of his familiar tropes have followed him into these paintings: skulls, spots, butterflies, ashtrays and sharks, to name but a few. 'Floating Skull' (2006), at the Wallace Collection, was one of his first solo efforts on canvas and is one of his best, although the inky pool from which his bony dome emerges is not a patch on Goya's genuinely frightening oil slick in 'Drowning Dog'. While not approaching either Goya's Black or Picasso's Blue Paintings, Hirst is suggesting we look at his blueish 'No Love Lost' series in the company of such masters, by daring to hang them in the esteemed company of Rembrandt, Velázquez et al at the Wallace. This mismatch has given us critics a field day, with the choicest terms including 'amateurish,' 'adolescent', 'derivative', 'boring' and even 'fucking dreadful' (that one was a worked-up Brian Sewell). I was initially more forgiving of these nascent stabs, feeling that they marked a new beginning and the possibility that Hirst might improve, transcend and eventually better himself.

Instead, as is his wont, Hirst has ploughed on in the same furrow for two pendant shows at White Cubes east and west, titled 'Nothing Matters'. There's little progression in the 18 further additions to the 27 already up at the Wallace - the triptychs get bigger and brasher, the surfaces busier and brighter - but he's no better. There are none of the palate-cleansing lemons, there's less of the intriguing darkness. There's too much gaudy colouration and images that yield their secrets too readily. The hot-red 'Insomnia' is going the wrong way entirely and only the most melancholic meditations on the grim reaper's inevitable march warrant much attention at all.

Aside from the insularity of his object-strewn interiors that rarely leave the studio, the motif of a solitary armchair in 'Empty Chair' and indistinct spaces in 'When Did We Lose Our Way' add a level of surreal depth to otherwise unsurprising compositions of crows, knives and emaciated, skeletal figures. In lieu of any actual self-portraits, only Hirst's suite of homages to his friend Angus Fairhurst, who committed suicide on the last day of his last London show in 2008, reveal anything more personal than the ramblings of a guy painting on automatic pilot. These five touching, albeit severed, heads of Fairhurst sacrificed to a higher cause, presented on a platter like St John the Baptist, seem personal and genuine - a blip of honesty among the overblown paintings-to-order at Mason's Yard. Hoxton Square is a disappointment too, with the shooting range of blood-spattered crows cramping the space in their ludicrous gold frames.

Most artists spend years honing their craft, or 'woodshedding', as jazz musicians call it, and wouldn't dream of exhibiting such half-baked experiments. Francis Bacon himself - for it is his steely gaze that watches over these proceedings - would regularly torch his overworked daubs and early sketches, for fear of them polluting his self-made myth of spontaneous genius. No, he worked and worked at them. Conversely, Hirst's new hand jobs need to be more self-critical, not so self-contained and self-obsessed. I was wrong to see paint as a new beginning for Hirst, because, at least for now, it's just another dead end.