Jonathan Jones 

Landscape

Saatchi Gallery, London
  
  


This is an oddly lackadaisical show, bunging together various odds and ends from the Saatchi Collection and spuriously claiming some kind of vision of contemporary landscape - which, predictably coming from Saatchi, turns out to be polluted, urbanised and unredeemed. Hannah Starkey's young women look for butterflies on a rubbish dump, thus patly capturing our loss of nature. Craigie Horsfield's photographs of Barcelona are richer as documents of the city landscape: nature not replaced but decadently decorated by electric light.

Mostly, though, this is a show about painting. Saatchi's take on landscape seems to be that it is first and foremost what painters used to paint. So here we have some painters who mourn that they can no longer paint what they ought to be able to paint. The only value of Dexter Dalwood's fantasies of Mikhail Gorbachev's country retreat and Che Guevara's hideout are that they demonstrate what is not a good painting. They show too much, too soon, so there is no reason to look for longer than 30 seconds. Glenn Brown's pastiche Dali adds nothing to the original except oversophistication. David Salle's layers of quotation from the history of art are as pointless now as they were when he was hailed in 1980s New York.

Dalwood, Brown and Salle are terrible warnings that an art of clever irony is never really going to make it. At least Tracey Emin looks as if she means it, as if she is searching for something in her picture of a weird ark in an expressionist harbour.

To be honest, going through these works feels pointless. Good and bad, they have been shown many times before, and there is something dreadfully stale about this revisit. Charles Saatchi succeeded in making his name inseparable from an era, but now it is over and he is left with the souvenirs. Here he is, wheeling out a mediocre assortment from his collection, and you wonder why he does it. There was a time when Saatchi's shows were provocative and important. That is hard to believe, picking over these bones.

· Until June 30. Details: 020-7336 7365.

 

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