The increasing fashion for showing contemporary artists alongside Old Masters often results in awkward collisions, but this show gets it right.
One painting by a master, JMW Turner’s Evening Star, is here. Chosen by Scully, it’s alone, hung deliberately and sensibly at a distance from his paintings, pastels and prints.
The Turner is one of those remarkable unfinished works he left at his death, essentially two horizontal bands representing the sky, with the planet Venus barely visible, and the sea, with a boy and his dog playing in the shallows. Almost all the painterly incident occurs where the bands meet: Venus’s reflection, hints of a fading sunset.
This is what the Turner has most in common with Scully: so much happens where colours abut. Also common to both artists’ work is a profound sense of atmosphere. But Scully could liberate paint from its representational function so that within a taut structure — blocks and bands of colour — it’s almost all atmosphere and emotion.
His specific response to Turner is Landline Star, a painting with seven horizontal bands of colour, hinting at horizons but denying illusion, bringing us back to the world of paint.
In three rooms we see Scully pushing and pulling surface and depth in dense pastels, exquisitely watery aquatint and spitbite prints, and vast paintings, where he continues to develop his language.
And while Scully’s paintings do evoke land, sea and sky, they’re as likely to reference the medieval Book of Durrow, Moroccan textiles and Van Gogh’s colour and mark-making. We see a painter wrestling not just with Turner’s legacy, but with the history of his medium. And, thankfully, without the forced juxtapositions that can ruin this kind of show.
Until Aug 11 (020 7747 2885, nationalgallery.org.uk)
