What does a skull mean to you? Is it a) Death, b) Death, or c) The death of Damien Hirst’s reputation? If you answered ‘c’ to the question above then you are mistaken: Hirst will undoubtedly prevail. But prevail to do what exactly? No Love Lost, Blue Paintings (the artist’s new exhibition at the Wallace Collection) would suggest he will prevail to show us yet more skulls – skulls next to ashtrays, skulls next to iguanas, and skulls next to other skulls. Gasp! Could this be a meditation on mortality? I think so! Because skulls, like, represent death and stuff, don’t they? Very good, Damien – but really, are there not more nuanced ways to convey such morbid platitudes?

Of course there was the skull covered in diamonds (people, like, die when digging for diamonds – get it? GET IT?), but it seems Hirst wants to establish himself as a painter, hence his decision to be displayed in the Wallace Collection, home to the likes of Rembrandt and Poussin. But this is the problem, since within this environment especially Hirst fails convince people of his talent for brushwork, which is frankly terrible. 

So he failed. So what? So this: all that is left to admire in works of limited technical merit are the concepts communicated by that technique, and it is here that we find Hirst truly lacking. There is, after all, nothing wrong with painting badly – the triumph of the idea over the execution has been a staple of the art world for so long now that it’s difficult to conceive of a time when anybody gave a toss for technical virtuosity. But Hirst's ideas are this: death. Always death. Death death and bloody death. Death communicated in the most simplistic manner by a skull.

Hirst has admitted that at points during the creation of these works he despaired when he found himself painting skulls with cigarettes in their mouths. He duly abandoned such obvious allusions to the way death hangs over the activities of life, but his compositions of skulls next to ashtrays deliver the same message in just as bludgeoning a fashion as the trite he rejected. With Hirst’s technical skills not worth cooing over we are just left with these macabre concepts, ones visualised with such mundane clarity that he may as well have just written ‘WE ALL DIE AND THIS PROCESS IS QUICKENED BY SMOKING’ on a canvas and had done with it. At least then the National Anti-Smoking Association would have had some ‘high art’ to push its cause.

For more information, see: http://www.wallacecollection.org/collections/exhibition/77