Gary Hume: paradise paintings and the indifferent owl, White Cube - review

There are no surprises, then, but the confident precision of Hume's work is still arresting.

Damien Hirst has talked about his spot paintings creating a feeling of both joy and horror, something I have never seen, but Hume supplies those conflicting moods in spades. Every delicate pink or seductive indigo meets a diarrhoea brown or a sludge green. Migration (2011), at Hoxton Square, a circle with a green and brown bird amid a field of sky blue, is sublime and ridiculous at once - evoking both a delicate Japanese print and a kid's wonky colour-by-numbers painting. The Paradise Paintings are similarly strange.

Young birds, apparently stretching up to be fed, are painted in a queasy combination of fleshy pink background, hospital-interior blue plumage and scarlet beak and eyes.

After seeing them, I read two interviews with Hume. "These are pubescent girls, naked," he said of the Paradise Paintings in the Guardian. "These [background forms] are their legs and that's [the beaks], their pussies," he added. Charming. The birds' eyes are menstrual blood, apparently.

Notably, while the publicity and catalogue refer to Hume's use of bodily fragments, any hint of pubescence is omitted.

The inspiration was in part the works of Henry Darger, an American outsider artist who may have had a mental illness or autism, and who wrote an epic illustrated tale of the heroic Vivian Girls battling the evil child-abusing Glandelinians. The Vivian Girls were more children than teens, and had penises, perhaps due to Darger's naivety relating to the female anatomy.

Hume's work seems far more cynical than Darger's, like a Young British Artist shock tactic a couple of decades too late. If it's a stab at humour, it fails. It's a shallow nod to a complex subject, and given that Hume is almost 50, it's also a little creepy.

Until February 25 (020 7930 5373, whitecube.com)

Gary Hume: paradise paintings and the indifferent owl
White Cube
48 Hoxton Square
N1 6PB