Curse of the zombie artists

Uh-oh, he's back. Professional bad artist and curator-provocateur Martin Maloney has assembled a group show of young painters for Anthony d'Offay.

Maloney is the man responsible for some of the most maligned exhibitions in recent years: the ICA's Die Young, Stay Pretty, and Saatchi's Neurotic Realism fiasco.

Now Maloney has put together seven artists, linked by little but a love of oil on canvas. For two of them, it's their first exhibition. But you'd never know, because it all looks pretty dreadful.

If ever proof was needed that painting is dead, here it is. Only now the corpse has sprung up from its shroud and is dancing on its own grave.

In the case of Kirsten Glass, the corpse wears the look du jour: Eighties retro styling, pictures of Kate Moss, and lots of fluorescent paint; last month's Vogue was her inspiration. These deliberately vacuous canvases are hideously adolescent, and their tendrils of clumpy paint induce nausea. Then there's Michael Ashcroft,

with his forgettable rip-offs of other artists' landscapes, copied with the emotional involvement of a lobotomised zombie.

Dan Perfect, true to his name, has not a brushstroke out of place: pretty airbrushed stripes mingle with cartoony motifs. Nicholas Barker is equally slick: copies of fruity old masters like Titian's Venus of Urbino are overlaid with photorealist porno chicks. It's tired stuff, like the X-rated work of Elizabeth Neal on the top floor: food, sex and innuendo? Sarah Lucas does it better.

You can take this kind of exhibition in various ways. If you still hold the torch for painting as a medium, this is an exciting showcase of hot, young, contemporary talent - gauche and ugly work with an edge.

If you think painting died back in the 1960s (if not before), it's a textbook example of endgame postmodernism: these artists know that everything you can do with painting has already been done - so they go for disaffected pastiche.

And if you think that this brand of postmodern irony is itself long past its sell-by date, Death to the Fascist Insect is just the latest pointless attempt to create a buzz - a tedious stab at injecting faux-radical cool into the blue-chip roster of a prestigious commercial gallery.