AS THE Saatchi Gallery starts to hang the first of a series of three exhibitions which, over the course of the year, will be dedicated to contemporary painting, The Triumph of Painting is being enthusiastically trumpeted. Other dealers are already preparing to follow suit. An art form commonly reported to be on its last legs is about to skip jauntily back into the aesthetic arena. The tortoise of tradition catches up with the hare of technology. The old-fashioned canvas overtakes newfangled conceptualism. Or does it? I would not start peeling the champagne foil yet.

Drawing and painting never disappeared in the first place. Even the most successful conceptualists picked up pencil or brush. Michael Landy, whose systematic destruction of all his possessions — including paintings by fellow artists — was about the most powerful performance of recent years, has recently shown drawings of his father that were done with a delicacy more often associated with Victorian gentlefolk than contemporary rebels. Tracey Emin produced a few leaves from her sketchbook for her Turner Prize display.

Painting has never been out of the picture. Rather, it has often been work on canvas that proved the most provocative. In Sensation, the landmark show at the Royal Academy, it was an image of Myra Hindley painted in children’s handprints that stirred public protest. And, when the Brit artists crossed the Atlantic for a show in New York, it was the painter Chris Ofili who whipped up a storm of moral indignation with his elephant-dung Madonna.

Of course, artists have always been inclined to experiment with up-to-date techniques. If Byron had been born today, he would probably have been a rock star instead of a poet. And Leonardo would surely have been computer literate, but would his impact as a painter have proved less profound? It is the mind, the emotion, the vision that matters; not the medium.

Painting, as Degas percipiently put it, is an activity that is easy if you do not know how to do it, but difficult when you do. After decades in which art has been made to look as easy as the on-off flick of an electric light switch, prepare to see work by people who mistake splashy self-expression — an ambition which few could fail to realise — for aesthetic importance. Prepare for a parade of clothes without any emperors inside them. Prepare for the sort of incompetence that will make you start wishing that painting would indeed undergo a dramatic decline.

A good painter is as rare as a good artist of any sort. The work of a few of them will be on display in the first part of the Saatchi series — Marlene Dumas, Martin Kippenberger, and Luc Tuymans among them. But these are not new discoveries. Their names are all firmly established. Their paintings have been selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds for some time. Nor do they backtrack on post-modernism’s progress. If anything they push it farther, exploring ways in which painting can become relevant in its context. They produce canvases that should be approached in much the same way as conceptual pieces.

Painting is not about brushstrokes, any more than writing is about words. It is not about subject matter any more than literature is about stories. The best painters struggle to embed meaning in the medium itself. Glenn Brown, who showed at the Serpentine last year, produces pastiches which at first glance look like plagiarism, but on closer inspection are as intricate as any argument about copyright.

Tuymans, recently the subject of a Tate Modern retrospective, makes deliberately dingy and understated images that entangle the viewer in an intensely problematic vision. They deal with the Holocaust, Belgian colonialism in the Congo, the fall of Saddam Hussein — not that you would ever know it at a glance. These are paintings that demand intellectual concentration as much as visual engagement. They deal with difficult concepts.

The trumpeted resurgence of painting does not spell a radical change in aesthetic outlook. It represents a presentational shift spearheaded by an adman-collector who has stuffed stockrooms to pick from. It is not the triumph of painting but of packaging.

That is no reason to dismiss it, any more than you would dismiss a rebranded detergent. Wait and see if the emperor’s new clothes come clean in this wash.

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