Charles Darwent, The Independent
Bad Painting, done well, has a solid place in 20th-century art. But there is Bad Painting and bad painting, and Hirst's work is the second.
Could the younger man's return to paint on canvas mark an admission that the Britart experiment has, in the end, been a failure? Seen like this, the dreadfulness of Hirst's painting might be excused as intentional, a sign that something has been lost in British art and that that loss is irreparable.
I left with a sense of sadness that a man whose pills and diamond-covered skull will remain icons of his time should have been laid so low.
Jonathan Heaf, GQ Magazine
Hirst - now less 'Bad Boy' and more the 'Bono' of Brit art'
Laura Cumming, The Observer
Hirst has no feeling for the things he paints, so nothing here has the graphic force and register of his sculpture, and the images are the opposite of what collage (his modus operandi) should be – subtle, coherent, significantly arranged. You can't get any feeling off these cannibalised Bacons at all.
But there is, I think, something profound at stake for Hirst himself. In the portrait of Angus Fairhurst, there is a palpable sense of effort, struggle, genuine perplexity. The fear of death, at last, is not theatrically faked.