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A great deal that I read about interests me.

Billed as one of the world's greatest painters, he is interested in chance. He believes in nothing. During a provocative youthful moment, he once said that now that there are no priests and philosophers, artists were the most important people in the world. His paintings sell in the high millions, and since the 1960s, he has had more than one hundred solo exhibitions around the world. And I have seen many of his paintings which have made me think, particularly some of his photography-based portraits.

But his new exhibition at the has left me cold, and wondering about the labels of greatness attributed to him. Entitled , it comprises a series of 49 paintings made up of bright monochrome squares randomly arranged in a grid formation.

So, 196 square panels of 25 coloured squares, configured differently each time using enamel paint, which has been sprayed on and then fixed onto the panels. Anyone who has encountered the children's stories about will be familiar with the images. There is much in the catalogue about the arbitrary distribution of colour and about uncertainty etc. Can you tell it hasn't made a big impression?

I would like to see Richter's design for the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral - destroyed during World War II and newly unveiled last year; there is a connection between this work and (from the photographs) the impressive design for the window.

I can see that in the context of a church there would be something mesmersing and possibly even spiritual about the arrangement of colours, but on the white walls of the Serpentine, for all the clever computer programming, it just felt like a cold concept.

There was though, a surreal quality to the press viewing; everyone waited for Richter to speak, but the bad sound system, and acoustics in the room meant little of what the great man said could be heard. He seemed quite uncomfortable in a public setting, though he appears not to be painting much these days, but doing a lot of putting exhibitions together and talking to the press, so you would think he would be at ease.

In a short, more intimate chat with a few journalists afterwards, he was charming, though clearly a man of few words. Given that marketing has become an art form in itself, given the hype and spin of recent weeks at auction houses, it's surprising how badly Gerhard Richter was presented.