Art doesn’t have to shock, but when the thrill of the avant garde has been subsumed into middle-class culture, we find ourselves in a terrible place, writes Jonathan Jones

His direct return of our look is bizarre and troubling, as is his wide, almost two-dimensional presence in front of the landscape. It is almost as if he were a wooden cut-out, like the painted wooden figure of a yokel that the British rococo painter Thomas Gainsborough once made.