BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, WC2

The BP Portrait Award stands, a stubborn tidemark of traditional skill amid the swift — and some would say shallow — currents of a contemporary art scene. This, no doubt, is the source of its fascination. Every year thousands turn up at the National Portrait Gallery to take a look. They want to see something that they recognise, to celebrate old-fashioned talent. And, let’s face it, what feels more fundamental than portraying a person?

But how can this sort of painting remain relevant in a world where photography has usurped its role? Frequent visitors to the BP Portrait Award will recognise the recurrent visual ticks. Here are genre-scene type confections incorporating the paraphernalia of modern life from the plastic chairs to the teenage bedsit guitars. Here are the objects that become metonyms for character — the rings or the half-smoked fags or the clutched coffee cups.

Viewers can enjoy a broad range of styles, from the flattering elegance of a contemporary Sargent, in which the evening-dressed sitter slants, a dark diagonal, across the canvas, to the full-on and brutally unforgiving passport-photo style piece. Too often, works seem to have been selected because of the sitter. Here is anyone from a flamboyant Boy George through a stern Glenda Jackson to the rainbow-kitted jockey A. P. McCoy.

Where a few years ago this exhibition would be overloaded with Lucian Freud followers attempting to effect the impasto style by which he transubstantiates oily matter into living flesh, this year photography sets the sternest challenge. How can a painter compete with its accuracy or its snapshot authenticity? Photorealism, for all that it might amaze with its meticulous technique, is far too prevalent. Several artists even mimic its monochrome and blurring of focus.

I liked Nathan Ford’s sketchy portrait — a head like a matchstick that has just fizzled, flared and died. But skill of the most traditional sort is what the selectors seem to have admired. A firmly understated but deeply pondered portrait by Wim Heldens takes a deserved first prize, while the second is stolen by out-and-away the most eye-catching contribution: Louis Smith’s Holly, a vast Victorian melodrama in an altarpiece of a frame.

Portraiture, unable to discover its place in contemporary society, takes a rest on the laurels of tradition, it seems.

From tomorrow to Sept 18 (npg.org.uk)