The Dresden-born German artist Gerhard Richter is best known for his hauntingly strange, photography-based paintings, works that often seem to hover somewhere between the documentation of everyday life, and some Dantean netherworld of haunted beings. At the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, he has returned to an earlier manner of pure abstraction, the beginnings of which he first developed more than 40 years ago, when he made paintings based on industrial colour charts.

Here, in a show entitled 4900 Colours: Version II, are 49 painted panels, mounted on aluminium, each one a seemingly random variant upon the next. Each panel is 97cm square, and each of these panels contains small squares of pure colour - yellow, orange, red, blue, purple, green, etc. The colours themselves are bright, glossy and rowdy - they shout back at us like reflective household enamels, flawlessly applied.

There is no iconography here, not even the merest hint. Nor is there any of the moody, introspective sensitivity of a Rothko, or indeed any evidence of the personal touch. The panels lack texture, or any element of unevenness. They look smoothly unauthored, as if some machine brought them into being - a computer, for example.

The colour combinations are, in part, randomly generated; the way in which the paintings are displayed, on the other hand, has been determined by the human eye. They are all rigidly squared up to each other; one of the walls is a mirror image of its opposite.

Relentless abstraction of this kind has severe limitations. When the elements don’t challenge each other rhythmically in some way, the surfaces can look inert and unaffecting. When the colour combinations look crude and randomly chosen - as they do here - we don’t feel anything about them. Other than that they seem lacking in finesse, charm or sophistication of any kind.

When colour is used by any artist - Matisse, Bonnard or Richter - we want to see those colours working with each other in such a way that we begin to think differently about the world. This does not happen here. This is an art about the spurious autonomy of art-making; an art about the extinction of any idea of the personal. Unfortunately, the very idea is an absurdity. Man is not a machine. And man should not pretend to make art as if he were a machine. In that direction lies overwhelming dullness and the extinction of wonder.

Forty years ago a much younger and more outspoken Richter said that the authority of painting might legitimately come to challenge the authority of the priest or the philosopher. Not this kind of painting, though. In competition with this kind of painting, religion and philosophy win by several furlongs.

- Serpentine Gallery (020 7402 6075) to November 16

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