Painting Now doesn't represent painting now. Thank goodness

The death of painting has been so often foretold — almost as frequently as its renaissance — that any such prediction today is nothing short of foolhardy. Of course, painting is alive and well and living in London, but you wouldn’t know that from the current exhibition of five artists at Tate Millbank. (By the way, this is a paying display, the regular admission fee being £10. Not surprisingly, it was deserted when I visited. This sort of show, to do its job properly and communicate to the public at large, should be free.) According to the press release, each of the five artists ‘has adopted an approach to painting that both exploits and subverts its conventions’. I wish. The exhibition is dull with obviousness and an almost total lack of real painterly experimentation. It begins with Tomma Abts, born in 1967 and a past winner of the Turner Prize, if that is supposed to be any mark of distinction. She contributes small, tasteful sotto voce paintings of mostly geometric and rather stagey pattern-making, shown together with one sheet of patinated bronze. (Is this really supposed to be a painting? Could try harder, surely.) Nothing startlingly original here — it’s the sort of thing that’s been done for decades by English and American artists (one thinks of Sol LeWitt and Prunella Clough) with rather more élan. In the second room is Simon Ling (born 1968), the artist here most obviously involved with the stuff of paint. He depicts odd corners of East London — fragments of shop fronts and façades — and has a penchant for crazy orange lighting, which could signal late-afternoon sunlight or a touch of Armageddon. They’re gauche and not particularly inspiring pictures (I’d rather look at the nonagenarian Anthony Eyton’s spirited portrayals of Spitalfields), but at least Ling is using paint with a certain vividness and vibrancy.