Ryan Mosley: a great artist in the making?

I like the paintings of Ryan Mosley, currently showing at London's Alison Jacques Gallery , for their marriage of grit and fantasy. Tough, hard-thought, intelligent textures – real painting, in other words – create realms of wilful play. Is it whimsy or is it tragedy? I'm not sure. The ambiguity interests me. Let me put this praise in context. I am not saying Mosley is a genius, but I am saying this 30-year-old's first serious solo show is unusually promising, indeed that some of the promise is already fulfilled. Mosley's best paintings are his biggest. There's a fine freedom and confidence to his large, even slightly grandiose, pictures that imagine a balletic Wild West, as if painted by Antoine Watteau . That 18th-century ghost haunts the best painting of all, a spacious white canvas with a minstrel playing a banjo – it's called Southern Banjo – beneath a tree. Isolated in his minstrelsy, at once proud and solitary, this timeless figure makes an immediate appeal to your sense of pathos. Mosley is a young 21st-century painter tackling themes comparable with those that Wallace Stevens described in his poem, inspired by Picasso, The Man With the Blue Guitar . It's hard to be negative about any of the works here. What matters is the sense that here is a painter doing what painters need to do: work. He is thinking through paint, and finding in its demands a complex, skilled style of his own, in the only place this can be done, the studio. Mosley has just been exhibited in St Petersburg – at the Hermitage, no less – in Charles Saatchi's exhibition Newspeak: British Art Now . This survey comes to London in June. I wouldn't want to bet on its overall quality, but his encouragement (and collecting) of Mosley shows that Saatchi still has the ability to spot real talent first.