One of the miracles of art history is how painting, so often written off, keeps on coming back. Right now we are in the middle of just such a resurgence, and one sign of the current vitality of the medium is the emergence of painters such as Hurvin Anderson. Admittedly, Anderson – who was born in 1965 – has been emerging for a long time now. But, with the opening of a big retrospective at Tate Britain, his status as a major figure in modern British art is clear.

Anderson is completely individual yet visibly connected to the tradition – indeed, to several traditions – and capable of creating huge, wall-filling canvases into which you can sink and float away, but which also make you think and feel. He can do things with paint that no one has done before, which is quite something given that human beings have been playing around with pigment on walls for around 60,000 years. The medium remains a good test of a painter’s stature.

‘Country Club: Chicken Wire’ (2008) demonstrates the point. It is on a grand scale, and the surface is covered by a depiction of wire fencing so brilliant that when you first see it from a distance you think the picture is wrapped in an actual fence. As trompe l’oeil it’s........

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