Sean Scully: Iona

What this exhibition shows most clearly is both how compelling Scully’s source material in Iona was, and his concurrent failure to realise this in the majority of the paintings on display. On the ground floor of the Ingleby Gallery, Sean Scully’s photographs of beautifully decrepit and rusting houses teem with mineral traces of time and weather. These minute manifestations of the chemical reactions between manmade materials and nature’s processes are harmoniously balanced by the bulky and stolid forms of doorways, walls and windows that contain them.

It is a disappointment, then, to walk into the adjacent Gallery II and in the paintings find no reference to this beyond a use of bulky monotonous forms - completely ignoring the formal contrast that made the photographs laudable. The copper-ground paintings entitled Twelve Triptychs are muddy and unremarkable. It would not be undeserving to advise visitors to ignore this room altogether. Upstairs however, the large triptych Iona has more presence and merits an extended examination.

Three large canvases painted with glossy oil paint hang well in Gallery I and rouse an august atmosphere, although how much this has to do with the beautiful space at the Ingleby Gallery rather than the paintings themselves is not certain. From a distance the strokes used replicate those downstairs; they evoke nothing more than a dry reference to the history of Abstract Expressionism and colour field painting. But between these blocks there is a light. This light shines through in imitation (albeit a pale one) of the formal congruities downstairs, hinting that behind the stagnant rectangles there is something living and glowing.

However, Scully fails to capitalise on this glimmer of intrigue as an opportunity to animate the listless rectangular blocks into an opposing force and so making the canvases alive in their internal contradictions. If you already know and like Scully’s work then naturally this is worth a visit as it’s exactly what you would expect from him; but for those expecting paintings that can live up to the title Iona, and the myriad associations it conjures, you will be disappointed.