Contemporary art is an eclectic affair. Jean-Frédéric Schnyder is an eclectic artist. But his eclecticism certainly doesn't resemble the dizzying shifts of imagery and style of a mix-and-match innovator such as Sigmar Polke. Nor does it approach the sense of psychic liberation of a tireless experimenter such as Otomo Yoshihide. Schnyder's eclecticism is more conceptual. He may borrow and steal from a vast range of art-historical sources, but everything is filtered through a painterly technique of remarkable and presumably deliberate stodginess.
Schnyder's exhibition of paintings, his first in the UK, leaves me feeling flat in the head and shallow in the heart. If his avowed "anti-art" intention is to level out all cultural inspiration and aspiration, he succeeds. The question remains: what's the point? I cannot believe in Schnyder as a super-naive celebrator of everything. Neither does he convince as a sophisticated nihilist. Maybe it is this ability to confound that explains his appeal.
Walking round the show, I kept imagining the efforts of a secondary school pupil who pastiches a bit of abstraction here and dabbles in a spot of pointillism there. One whole room is filled with 20 almost identical paintings of a floral still life, with each flower, plant pot and background all reduced to a close-up pixillated puzzle. Next we get a set of mountainous landscapes, each ripple of water and rocky crevice filled in with plodding self-consciousness. Painters often aspire to a certain technical awkwardness to give the image an unpredictable edge. But Schnyder's awkwardness appears contrived, at times almost cynically so.
A painting entitled Thinking is an embarrassment of pseudo-melancholic expressionism. Schnyder even apes ill-informed political indulgence with a swastika hovering in the sky above a silhouette of a concentration camp. So is poetic art still possible after the Holocaust? Or are we doomed to regurgitations of cliches and ineffective cultural gestures such as we find in profusion in this confounding and confounded exhibition?
· Until July 28. Details: 0121-248 0708.
