Issy Wood: A Review of Self-Portraits – Suffocatingly Revealing Works from the Ultimate Painter of the Mustache Decade

National Portrait Gallery, London These close-up paintings seem to capture our boring, dull, always-online lives – but there's humor and silliness among the masks. You might get the feeling that Issy Wood is staring right at you, staring from every canvas, making hard, uncomfortable, stubborn eye contact. But he is not. The young British painter, immersed in spiritual rumination, stares at himself

I can feel Issy Wood staring right at you, staring out from every canvas, making hard, uncomfortable, stubborn eye contact. But he is not. The young British painter is staring at himself, immersed in spiritual rumination. You just entered at the wrong time.

This show at the National Portrait Gallery - the first in a new series of presentations looking at contemporary artists' use of portraiture - is Wood's first major public effort to record his face. He has painted self-portraits before, but never on this scale, never this big and personal. For years, his focus has been largely on external stimuli: Diet Coke cans, antiques, watches, ceramics, leather jackets. Midnight resurrection stuff, obsessive research, fetishistic desire. Over the years, to see his focused, mild-mannered approach to mundane mundane tasks like snooping on someone's web pages is to look at the diary of a bored, sad, over-caffeinated youth.

He never really needed to paint his face because his work was always completely personal and reasonable. But he's done it anyway, and the results are tense and heightened. He's taken the same angular, blurry and short hybrid approach, but now it's all skin and lips and tears. She drinks a Diet Coke while wearing a wet mask in a giant painting, presses her cheek to another mirror, and doubles her twisted reflection. In some smaller works his cheeks and eyebrow bleed, in others he leans heavily on his guitar. One of the paintings makes him sob, his eyes become blurry and he becomes discouraged.

Each painting here is his look at himself, steeped in navel-gazing and pitiful introspection. The two photos of him as a child are full of smiles and giggles, but they only help you realize how miserable the rest of the pictures are, and how miserable he must be. And that's not a bad thing artistically (but probably not great on a personal level) because it makes for some really good paintings. They're strange, suffocating, intimate things, like they let you in on her weakest moments, like you cut her off in the middle of crying. You feel like you have to quietly leave the gallery to let him get on with it.

It makes everything look worse and worse than it really is. There is humor in the work, a little silliness at times. In one painting, he frames his face with monstrous wooden plastic fingers, as if he knows it's all a bit too much.

It's a wonder he hasn't gotten more major organizational attention, because he's not only good, he's quietly important. A host of close, dark and dull imitators have followed him. He's a darling of the market, and I think we'll be looking at him as the premier Julian painter for decades to come.

Few artists manage to portray the overwhelming, endless and exhausting anxiety, unhappiness and jealousy of the contemporary Western condition like Issy Wood. It is the art of the bored, the medicated, the people who are always online, the depressed and depressed people who feel that no matter what they do, they will never be happy. And as unsettling as it is, the mirror she's holding up to her face here is actually reflecting us back to ourselves.