Painting is very popular among today’s young artists, but in an idiom rather different from that of the various revivals we’ve witnessed since the ’70s. It’s no longer about invoking aura, daring to stand alongside the great figures of the century, or breaking “the hated form of real things,” as Malevich put it. Instead, there is an effort to retain photographic framing without losing the pleasures specific to the slow consummation of a picture, not to mention those associated with tactility. But there’s something else: The return of painting does not signal a debate over the prevalence of a