Dead ending

Mat Collishaw

Mat Collishaw has always seemed to me to be the least exciting artist of the YBA generation. His big photograph of a bullet-punctured scalp - now at the Saatchi Gallery - certainly made him one of the more in-your-face artists to show at Sensation. And, though it earned him a 'Mr Nasty' tag, it also belied an essentially workmanlike approach to art.

Where were the layers of playful, subtle meaning that exemplified the best of that generation? Collishaw's work just seemed plodding and one-dimensional.

With his new show, Collishaw does nothing to shift this perception. In Modern Art's new, bigger venue, one room shows a set of photographs hung in ornate, Victorian frames. These feature colour pastiches of Victorian child portraiture, a kitsch homage perhaps to Julia Margaret Cameron or Charles Dodgson. Others show roses being consumed by fire, while another alludes to classical mythology and features a garlanded bull.

The second room is a little more interesting. Collishaw has digitally manipulated a set of black and white photographs to give them a tessellated appearance and then rendered the images in three huge mosaics - they look rather like reproductions of Chuck Close paintings.

But, except in the most rudimentary way, you never really feel that Collishaw ventures beyond the confines of the immediately striking image. What, if anything, is he saying about mythology, or the art of the past, or even about sentimentality in art? Why go there at all? Collishaw's work always seems to exist only in a conceptual cul-de-sac.