The "is painting dead?" debate, perennial to art history, is also perennially ignored by practising painters. Yet it is undeniable that, in London, something has changed outside that coterie. For the past couple of years, commercial galleries have increasingly been showing work by painters - often by young or emerging artists (though this has more to do with the fashions of the art world than with any inherent superiority over artists in other media).
At the moment, the "biggest" show - the one with the greatest commercial success, as well as the most media coverage - is an exhibition of paintings by Mark Alexander at Haunch of Venison. All the work has sold - was pre-sold, in fact, before the show even opened. Not that there is, actually, that much work on display, especially given that this show is meant to represent a full decade's work. Alexander's work-rate seems to be barely above one painting a year.
It's obvious why his paintings take so long - they are extraordinarily, painstakingly accurate copies of existing images. His five "Baby" paintings, made over four years, are huge, photo-realist compositions based on snapshots of Alexander himself as a toddler. Similarly mimetically perfect are his three copies of a portrait by Van Gogh of Dr Gachet, his friend and physician - identical replications, except for the fact that they are black monochromes. Alexander's versions seem to be in mourning for Van Gogh's original, one of the most expensive works of art ever sold, which, if rumours are true, was cremated along with its late owner.
Hernan Bas, on the other hand, is much more prolific. All the works being shown at Victoria Miro gallery, more than two dozen, were made this year. His keenness is understandable: Bas is hot right now. As the leading light in Miami's burgeoning art scene, he is highly collectible. Charles Saatchi, for one, has been buying his work, and his painting will feature in The Triumph of Painting, Part III. Though I hope these are better works than the ones at Victoria Miro.
Waiflike young men pose elegantly, half-naked or in tight t-shirts, usually in various woodland environments: lounging decadently under a tree; drinking wine in forest glades; or bathing in streams. Their simple depiction - like something from a fashion designer's sketch-pad - is in contrast to the rest of the scene: a wild flurry of different colours and ways of mark-making - thick squiggles; quick loops; bits of pattern; the paint applied in heavy clumps, or sometimes left thin and scratchy.
These paintings seem to explore aesthetic pleasure - the sheer enjoyment of painterly technique and the homoerotic charms of beautifully wasted young men. But Bas doesn't seem to do anything particularly interesting or innovative with these two ideas.
A second artist, David Harrison, is also showing at Victoria Miro. His work is certainly arresting, if only because it's so weird. His paintings depict a lurid, carnivalesque, spirit-world full of nocturnal apparitions, and animals dressed as people.
Even though the artist is in his forties, this is his first solo show, and his first real exposure, which makes it hard to know how to read his work - whether as a modern fairytale, magical and fantastic, or as a knowing parody of bad-taste, acid-casualty art.
Another slightly older artist is Fergal Stapleton, who is showing at Counter Gallery. Part of the same generation as the leading Young British Artists, he never achieved his contemporaries' success or notoriety. His work was less brashly in-your-face; less concerned with its immediacy; more subtle.
He has made paintings before, but they were so different from his current work that they could have been by another artist. His recent works, on display at Counter, are murky, gloomy, almost seedy. One painting is an extreme close-up of a dirty old penny found behind a sofa, maybe. In several works, real bits of tinsel have been stuck to the front of the canvas - like something left over from last Christmas. Stapleton's project is about redeeming objects or materials that usually get overlooked.
It is clear, then, that these four artists - Alexander, Bas, Harrison and Stapleton - do not share much ground in terms of style or subject matter. Beyond the fact that they are all painters, the only thing linking their work is that it is figurative.
Two interesting young painters, both of them Dutch, refer to this figurative impulse in contemporary painting. In the work of Rezi van Lankveld, at The Approach, apparently random patterns in the thickly swirled paint resolve themselves into recognisable forms, like seeing a face in lines in marble. In a group show at Interim Art, Maaike Schoorel - another artist collected by Saatchi - makes large, almost totally white canvases, with only a few suggestive grey marks here and there. Study them long enough, and figures emerge, like looking at a faded, virtually indecipherable photograph.
But, again, it is meaningless to associate artists such as these with someone such as Tilo Baumgartel, one of several painters from Leipzig who have been getting attention recently. Baumgartel makes a very different kind of work. His beautifully stylised paintings of anthropomorphised animals - there is one in a group show at Anthony Wilkinson - look like plates from some wonderful, though slightly sinister, children's book. They are visual narratives, unconcerned with formalist questions about abstraction versus figuration.
One current group painting show, though, does hint at a reason for painting's current status. The work - by seven young, up-and-coming artists - is totally heterogeneous: from the schlock-horror of a pseudo-adolescent gore-fest; through crisply rendered, sci-fi influenced, landscape paintings; to tiny, muddy paintings that quote the matter-of-fact, educational imagery of 1960s Ladybird books for children.
But this show is not in a commercial gallery. It is at Bloomberg Space. And this association between new painting and finance is apposite. For though there is no unifying style, theme or artistic ideology among the current crop of painters, they do have one thing in common: the economic climate.
The popularity of painting often coincides with boom periods of art buying - the last time people spoke of painting as being "big", for instance, was during the 1980s. New collectors, in particular, attracted to a buoyant art market, tend to go for paintings. Their ease of display, combined with their historical legacy and their aura of originality and uniqueness, means that paintings are unrivalled not as works of art, but as commodities. Perhaps the best way to view the current status of painting, then, is not so much as an artistic phenomenon, but as an economic one.
