Tomorrow, the exhibition Being Present opens at the Jerwood Space in Southwark, a stone's throw from Tate Modern. The show features eight figurative painters, most of whom have previously won prizes in the annual BP Portrait Award exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. The NPG's ex-director, Charles Saumarez Smith, now director of the National Gallery, has written a supportive catalogue essay, and I understand William Feaver, critic and biographer of Lucian Freud, is also making a brief contribution. Being Present has already attracted a certain amount of publicity because it has been taken to mark a resurgence of figurative painting, at a time when, according to the catalogue, "figurative painting is criticised by some as a traditional mode of representation that is out of touch with the realities of contemporary life". Excuse me? Who on earth believes that?
Saumarez Smith writes: "It feels as if the art world is looking for a new tendency to promote, after the work of the YBAs has lost the cachet of novelty," and goes on to wonder if the kind of work in Being Present could be the next big thing. He should get out more. There is no next big thing. In any case, the novelty of the YBA generation wore off a decade ago. For younger artists, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin probably look as old hat and establishment as Howard Hodgkin or Henry Moore. Emulating the strategies of the past generation - in terms of self-promotion as well as their more formal devices - would be pointless and self-defeating. Artists have to carve out their own territory. What the eight painters here see themselves as representing is a tradition under threat, drowned out by other kinds of art practice, and ignored by critics.
The idea that the "art world" is looking for a new tendency to promote is itself wrong-headed. Current art is marked, if anything, by its plurality. One might also talk about there being many art worlds: international and local, the world of alternative spaces and that of museums; and all those galleries that specialise in their different ways, and who sell to very different kinds of collector. And all those tribes of artists, with their friendship patterns, animosities, their competitiveness and career jealousies, their divergent beliefs and world views. There is less conformity than one might think. Bully for difference.
There are good figurative paintings and bad (often good or bad for very different reasons), just as there is good and bad video art, photography, sculpture and so on. The assumption that figurative painting in particular is under threat, or somehow ignored by public and private institutions, or, as one of the artists in Being Present put it last week, "the prevailing argument in the art world seems to be that [representational painting] is an archaic form of expression", is actually a nonsense.
All this would be merely annoying were it not for the fact that what is being propagated here is the notion that painting is ignored by galleries and museums, that critics like me don't write about it, that art students are encouraged by their tutors not to paint, that the public is not given an opportunity to see painting and that the international art world is a sort of repressive Smersh organisation, bent on the evil purpose of destroying a tradition. One of the artists in the show writes about "working in oil, a medium nominally regarded as near bankrupt". This is melodramatic, as well as untrue. Studios are full of painters. There are painting shows everywhere, all the time.
Next week, Tate Modern opens a show of Edward Hopper, and next month, a major show of figurative painter Luc Tuymans. A substantial number of works by the marvellous American portraitist Alice Neel, who is also being given a major London exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery next week, has also just gone up at Tate Modern, alongside works by Picasso and Stanley Spencer. The Whitechapel has just held a major retrospective of Raoul de Keyser, Lucian Freud was just at the Wallace Collection, Peter Doig has a major European touring show and the Royal Academy is currently planning an international painting exhibition. Need I go on?
The real problem is not that painting is marginalised, but that the painters in Being Present feel themselves to be so. There must be a conspiracy against them. Either that, or they just aren't terribly interesting. In any case, they have been, and continue to be, supported by shows like the BP Portrait Award, and by prestigious portrait commissions, some of which have been acquired by the NPG itself. The current director of the National Gallery clearly supports them. The artists in Being Present have their market, but probably secretly wish that they could show in the same galleries as, say, Gerhard Richter or Marlene Dumas (both of whom, among other things, paint portraits), and that they too could have mid-career retrospectives travelling the museums of Europe. If it isn't going to happen it is not because they paint from life, or because they are interested in portraiture, but because their actual ambition as painters is cramped and their work is frequently horribly stylised.
In the case of Stuart Pearson Wright, the most vociferous of the group, his work is so self-regarding, mannered and filled with silly jokes and strained for surreal effects - a baby with the head of Steven Berkoff; a woman laying in the bath with her big toe stuck up the tap; a ventriloquist with his exact miniature double for a dummy - that it is difficult to believe he has any real respect for the intelligence of his audience.
In fact, for all their apparent sincerity, the painters here are somehow arty and mannered in their approach. This is dispiriting. Grubby nudes in grubby studios, miserabilist, existentially challenged self-portraits, vapid illustrational watercolours, paintings with a look - often a determined look of struggle, and a peculiar lack of liveliness - rather than a purpose.
It is also worth saying that one of the things that marks the sophistication and intelligence of an artist is a consciousness of how they display their work. I made two visits to Being Present this weekend, as it was being installed. It was more like stuffing a turkey than an installation process. The show is ridiculously crowded, with little sense that the artists have given much thought to the presence of individual paintings, how they command the space around them, or how they might talk to one another (and there was I thinking that the show was called Being Present). Surely, one of the key aspects of painting from life is its apprehension of how forms and objects occupy space, and the difference between painted space and actual space.
There are those who deeply resent a great deal of the art of our time. They are infuriated by the absence of certainties in current art, and by what they continually see as artists and museum curators, critics, theorists and dealers "pulling the wool over the public's eyes", in some weird conspiracy. Painter Brendan Neiland, Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools, commented in the Guardian last week that: "One or two very well-known artists have said to me they are going to be sick if they see another piece of conceptual art." Let them be sick. And if they are so well-known, what have they to complain about? Perhaps they are in the wrong art world. In any case, all art has got to have a few good concepts going for it in order to get anywhere. Even painting. Perhaps especially painting.
Being Present - 8 Figurative Painters, is at the Jerwood Space, London SE1, from Wednesday to July 4. 020-7654 0171. www.beingpresent.co.uk