http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/painting-now-five-contemporary-artists
Now, now. This show is almost over, so the only people looking at it were students. It presents a very dry picture of the present state of painting. One imagines a thin lipped human wearing spectacles, who enjoys reading art monthly, selecting it. First room is Tomma Abts, hard-worked geometric abstractions which are occasionally optically delightful, but evoke mostly a meh.
Remember the constructivists a million years ago.
Next Simon Ling a guy who paints cityscapes from life, rather Euston road school, with a squiffy horizon line and fluorescent underpainting, they are pleasant, and nicely painted. If you saw them in the London Art Fair, you'd be surprised how good they were. Once again, you think wasn't this popular a while ago.
Ok wow now we've got Lucy Mckenzie with some trompe l'oeil and a big structure painted green. It's all about something important, probably architectural. It must be more than some finicky bulletin boards, that are, gasp, actually paintings, mustn't it?
Then onto a similar artist in Catherine Story whose work is similarly not exciting, but this time in a less figurative way, but you presume it must therefore be about something very clever indeed.
And finally Gillian Carnegie who makes figurative paintings eg a cat on the stairs, but they're painted in weird colours, like all grays, or odd textures, so that too must make them good or somehow more profound than a painting of a cat.
So here's the painting NOW thesis, abstract or fig, don't matter, as long as it's kind of odd with some reference to an outdated style or a set of rather obscure ideas that would make a good review in an art magazine. The paintings seem stuck in referentiality rather than capturing the life of the world or mind or a person Painting Now: as long as its about yesterday and not embarrassingly personal or interesting.