There is a Kingdom

Damien Hirst Doorways to the Kingdom of Heaven 2007 Butterflies and Household Gloss on Canvas

Plenty is being written about the Tate Modern's current Damien Hirst show so I don't particularly want to dwell on it here, but having looked around it a couple of times now I do keep coming back to these pieces particularly because of their connection to still life painting.
If the tradition of still life is to do with the isolation or collection of mundane objects (that is, things of the everyday) as a way of discussing larger themes in a rhopographic way, then these pieces would seem to do this very literally by actually bringing the object (in this case dead butterflies) onto the canvas, and trapping them there in a way that puts us in mind of the taxonomic displays of the pre-Modernist collector of specimens. Indeed, much of Hirst's oeuvre draws heavily on the history of the wunderkammer and associations of categorisation and classification.
Granted, Hirst is a long way from being the first to do this - there are plenty of Modern examples such as Picasso, Duchamp and Rauschenberg.
What is interesting here however is that the butterflies are employed precisely not as specimens of nature but rather as specimens of colour. Each brilliant wing becomes a coloured piece in the mosaic whole.
Whilst the obvious stained glass window motif is strongly apparent, there is a crucial difference in that these are very contemporary stained glass windows. Saints and narratives are replaced with geometric abstraction more reminiscent of eastern traditions. Form and colour replace any direct storytelling with mathematical repetition.

Franz Francken II Kunst und Raritatenkammer 1636

Detail of Doorways to the Kingdom of Heaven

For me there is a natural connection between these repetitive patterns and the decorative armour and shields I have been researching for my current paintings. These masterfully wrought objects contain their own worlds of narrative or abstraction, and were designed not as functioning armour at all but rather for display, giving them at once a magnificence and a futility - they will never perform the functions which their shapes evoke. 

Philip Rundell Shield of Achilles 1821 The Royal Collection

Using such objects in paintings increases this frustration of function; paintings of objects designed for display are even further removed from any sense of real action. Norman Bryson discusses this effect in relation to Willem Kalf's paintings of armour in his essay Abundance (Reaktion Books, 1990):

Divorced from use, things revert to absurdity; anticipating nothing from human attention, they seem to have dispensed with human attention, whose purpose and even existence they come to challenge.

Armour for Field and Tournament 1527 Royal Workshops Greenwich - Collection of Metropolitan Museum New York

Such objects, with their associations of power, privilege and cultural dominance make for rather formidable subjects for painting. They do not include but rather isolate the viewer, keeping them at a distance and warning them against any attempt at interaction. The associative, communal space of the still life table is replaced by the cold, impregnable, even unreal space of the museum display cabinet. And this metaphor is reinforced by the form of the objects; armour by definition is designed to keep others out.