From The Times

Rachel Campbell-Johnson doesn't think much of Damien's little show either:

"Hirst has been painting. And by that he doesn’t mean employing a team of assistants to produce the paint-by-numbers-type canvases familiar from recent shows. Hirst has been alone in his studio working with palette and brush.

"The result is No Love Lost — a show of 25 pictures. Seen from a distance they don’t look too bad. Their dark expanses are seductively presented in traditional gilt frames. They fill the galleries with an eerie blue Insect-O-Cutor-style glow.

"But take a step farther and a pale, silk-papered boudoir transforms into what feels more like a teenage boy’s bedroom. You can almost smell the brooding odours of existential angst.

"Here are all Hirst’s familiar obsessions: the skulls, the shark’s jaws, the ashtrays, the spots with the odd iguana or little O-level, “still life” lemon added to the mix. Hirst floats his images on the dark surface of the canvas, mapping out their spaces and relationships with a mesh of perspective lines.

"These works are utterly derivative of Bacon (give or take a dash of Giacometti), but they completely lack his painterly skill. And their metaphors are as ham-fisted as the application of pigment.

"Look to the end of the galleries and you will see Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time. Hirst appears to hope that his heavy handed memento mori will make him part of the line-up of art historical tradition. But the artist who has made his reputation with shock now produces works that are shockingly bad. And who knows, maybe this is his trick. Is his brand so strong that we can’t resist turning up to look — even at works on which we know no love will be lost?"          (The Times, 14th October 2009)

Here's the Poussin:

and here's one of the Hirsts, called "Requiem: White Roses and Butterflies 1":

It makes you want to weep, doesn't it?  But not in the way Damien wants you to . 

(Article first published on 18/10/2009)