Doom, gloom and Damien Hirst

When Damien Hirst showed A Thousand Years, his vitrine featuring a cow’s head, maggots, flies and an insectocutor at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992, it attracted a particularly esteemed visitor. Francis Bacon, Hirst’s hero, praised the piece in a letter to a friend: "It really works," he wrote.

Hamfisted: Hirst’s triptychs, such as Insomnia, are confused and incoherent attempts to ape Francis Bacon

Hirst had taken Bacon’s obsession with flesh and decay and his complex framed space and synthesised them with sculptural influences such as Jeff Koons and Donald Judd to create an original visual language.

Bacon’s recognition of Hirst’s achievement echoed through my thoughts as I viewed Hirst’s latest paintings at both branches of White Cube. The works’ debt to Bacon is enormous — there are numerous triptychs, his favourite format; they are set in weighty golden frames; and they contain expressively painted figures and objects set amid sketchy lines reminiscent of Bacon’s "space frames".

But where Bacon counterbalanced his often tortured subject matter with a fluent and even graceful handling of paint, Hirst’s application is leaden and blunt. Where Bacon created spaces that were ambiguous and enticingly enigmatic, Hirst’s are confused and incoherent. Twenty years ago, Hirst was eloquently moving Bacon along. Now he hamfistedly apes him.

Both shows are divided into two discrete groups of paintings. Hoxton Square has three triptychs featuring crows shot in mid-flight, with trails of blood pouring from them, as well as several skull paintings. At Mason’s Yard, a series of works reflects Hirst’s response to the tragic suicide of the artist Angus Fairhurst last year, including five portraits of Fairhurst, while below are four triptychs depicting interiors packed with still lifes and figures.

The lexicon of forms in the paintings will be familiar to anyone who has seen Hirst’s paintings at the Wallace Collection — skulls, shark jawbones, skeletal and shadowy figures, roses and knives. The crows join this list of harbingers and symbols of death, as do the empty chairs that recur in the triptychs at Mason’s Yard and the Medusa figure who appears in two works.

Like his sculptures and installations over the past two decades, the paintings are dominated by macabre thoughts. But in those earlier works he was often able to create lucid and, I would argue, beautiful images reflecting this obsession. His painterly language remains inarticulate, especially in the cluttered triptychs at Mason’s Yard.

Even in the Fairhurst portraits, which are no doubt heartfelt, he struggles to turn his grief for his friend into fitting elegies, or to capture convincingly the anger he mentions in a catalogue interview; they are gloomy rather than poignant.

Unlike other commentators, I take no joy out of finding these works so unsuccessful. Like Bacon, I was impressed, in fact quite profoundly affected and excited when, as an art student, I saw A Thousand Years in the Saatchi Gallery. But his paintings so far feel like a gigantic backwards step. To use Bacon’s term, they really don’t work.

Until 30 January (020 7930 5373, www.whitecube.com). Tues–Sat, 10am–6pm, admission free.

Damien Hirst: Nothing Matters
White Cube At Mason's Yard
Mason's Yard, SW1Y 6BU