Then again, it is the least fanciful work here. In Seaworld, portraying an ocean theme park, bikini-clad girls feed giant, primitive fish, and sit astride basking plesiosaurs. A seal with a head at each end wears an inflatable ring round its body, probably in homage to Robert Rauschenberg's goat with a tyre round its belly. A polar bear/sea urchin thing bounces on to the water, and the tentacles of a giant squid writhe against the glass wall of the tank. The ranked audience looks on, unamazed. Some of these scary, or amusing, denizens of the deep are derived from creatures that once lived, while others are fanciful. So it is in Rockman's Pet Store, a sort of helical, overdesigned stand on which various pets squat, as forlorn as zip-up teddy bears. Like the architecture of Seaworld, the extravagant display stand was designed for Rockman by architect Chris Morris, from the Rockwell Group practice in New York. The Rockwell Group, among other things, have proposed a drastic redevelopment for London's Battersea Power Station. Morris may have one ironic foot in the modernist tradition, but the other is firmly planted in sci-fi comics and movie design. So is Rockman's work itself; among his influences he has cited Syd Meade (designer of the movie Blade Runner), and "palaeontological illustrator" Charles R Knight (1874-1953), whose murals decorate the halls on many American natural history museums, and whose style will be familiar from illustrated encyclopaedias and books about dinosaurs. For a long time, illustration was a taboo for painters. Rockman, however, is an eclectic hoarder of all kinds of imagery, as his notes as well as his art testify, from Dutch still life to Hieronymus Bosch, from botanical watercolours to scientific illustration. In the 1980s, Rockman was assistant to Ross Bleckner, another painter whose work is filled with stylistic quotation, and can be seen in terms of hybridisation, cross-fertilisation and mutation. Hot House (2003) is a sort of Kew Gardens glasshouse populated with an alarming repertoire of profoundly sexualised plants. Plants, however, don't need much sexing-up. Here are a lily of the valley sporting a pair of pendulous bollocks, succulents bearing breasts, carnivorous flytraps and pitcher plants you'd be unwise to muck about with; there are flowers with pink puckered anuses and others that could flourish only in the back room of a sex-toy store.

Rockman's skill is evident, but it is all a bit obvious. Nor does size help in his art - his paintings work almost as well in reproduction as they do full scale. Maybe the real problem is that Rockman's Wonderful World is neither marvellous enough nor horrible enough. Nor can he compete with the movies - with Cronenberg or Spielberg or the special effects technicians. Somehow his paintings are no longer quite realistic enough for us, and painting has to use another kind of realism. The future worlds Rockman depicts are pretty grim - when they aren't just silly - but there isn't any way for him to deal with the absolute tragedy of the waning and destruction of the natural world, nor with the remorseless and vain idea of progress, the rise of a fantastical artificial nature, designed for entertainment which he predicts here. But if the worst of what the future has in store, for those of us who survive the major ecological disasters, the floods and pandemics, the famines and wars to come, is almost unthinkable, the best is equally unimaginable. I foresee a spectacular mediocrity, and in his way so does Rockman. In his two short essays on Rockman, written not so long before his own death, Gould praised the artist's contribution to the dialogue between art and science, his ability to "fracture and amalgamate categories", and to find a union "among falsely divided disciplines by recognising human presence in all categorisations". Perhaps hope was what Gould was after. For all the references and research, Rockman's work isn't nearly as profound as per haps he would like it to be. Maybe we need to ask how could it be, and what is, in this wonderful world of ours? -T.Guardian. ( Alexis Rockman: Wonderful World is at the Camden Arts Centre, London NW3, until June 13. Details: 020-7472 5500)


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