It couldn't get worse for Hirst

Someewhat late in the day, Damien Hirst has decided to find out whether he can paint. So far, he has been able to do without such specialised, old-fashioned skills. When Andy Warhol transformed his studio into a factory, he announced that from now on art would be an industrial operation, dispensing with originality and relying on teams of toilers, proudly advancing beyond manual craft. With a frisson of dread, Hirst calls painting a "solitary practice". He makes it sound as if he were obliged to revert to masturbation after the coital companionship of the production line that arranged the bottles on the shelves of his Pharmacy.

The results of Hirst's experiment with actual artistry aren't encouraging. Twenty-five canvases installed in two galleries rearrange his morbid fetishes, wearily shuffling a pack of greasy, dog-eared cards. Most of the paintings contain skulls, sometimes accompanied by more contemporary emblems of mortality - a cigarette, a pink lighter, a filthy ashtray. When handling an actual skull, like the one he encrusted with diamonds a while ago, Hirst can make a witty point about beauty and decay; to paint a skull proves trickier. The bone, which ought to be so clean and austerely white when the messy flesh rots away, looks squashy and structureless when he paints it, like the confectionery skulls children gobble in Mexico on the Day of the Dead.

Panicking a little, he creates a fussy diversion with cobwebs of intersecting lines that crosshatch the surface, a gimmick copied from Francis Bacon. But in Bacon, these are vectors of force, arrows of desire. Here, they serve to distract an eye that otherwise finds nothing to engage its interest.

Occasionally, a lemon strays into the arrangement, probably because its shape makes it easy to paint. An iguana, which Hirst's amateurish daubing turns into something like a crayfish, briefly scuttles on. In one painting, he attempts a facsimile of a nautilus shell, one of nature's most intricate contraptions; it looks, when he's done with it, like a scrofulous human ear. A vase of white roses buzzed by butterflies is a dithery fiasco, all the more pitiful because it's hung not far from the Wallace Collection's Watteaus and Fragonards, in which entire landscapes bud, blossom and frolic, alive with fertile delight.

Hirst claims to be engaged in a dialogue with the collection's ancestral presences: he sees the aquatic snake in Titian's Perseus and Andromeda as a precursor of his own white shark, and fancies that his tediously repetitive skulls reinforce the meaning of Poussin's grandly choreographed The Dance to the Music of Time. In two paintings that purport to be about the birth of the Medusa, he ventures into the dark wood of myth, which he has confused with the spooky shrubbery of The Blair Witch Project. Rothko said that painting could only dramatise our predicament by employing gods and monsters; Hirst has to make do with bogeys in plastic Halloween masks.

Outside Hertford House, London, which houses the Wallace Collection, he has set up a sculpture of St Bartholomew flaying himself, entitled Exquisite Pain. As in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, the saint brandishes the blade with which he has performed the operation and dangles his limp skin over his arm like a dirty shirt. Is Hirst claiming to conduct the same internal inquisition, laying bare his fears? He shouldn't claim such existential courage; his speciality is queasy horror, not tragic terror.

And despite the rowdy bravado with which he jokes about mortality and welcomes the Apocalypse, he has the small soul of an interior decorator. The icy cobalt blue of the paintings in No Love Lost is, to use his prissy word, "exquisite".

A few of the canvases are upstaged by the floral borders of their carved frames and they all look crass by contrast with the blue silk wall fabric behind them, commissioned by Hirst from a weaver in Lyons once patronised by Marie Antoinette.

In our consumerist world, the nifty package matters more than the naff product inside and Hirst's titles are often more interesting than the paintings they tag. One of his triptychs, featuring three more skulls plus the gaping, serrated mouth of a shark, is called The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth. I assume Hirst is mocking the Christian prophecy, because his own career demonstrates that things have turned out rather differently. In art at least, the pushy and the publicity-hungry, the self-aggrandising and the meagrely talented are the inheritors.

Bumptiously confronting Titian, Poussin and other venerable elders at the Wallace Collection, Hirst is enjoying his temporary ownership of the trampled, desecrated earth. But he's not a legitimate heir and the Wallace Collection is playing host to a jumped-up pretender.

No Love Lost, Blue Paintings at the Wallace Collection, London, runs until January 24.

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