UFO Info Week-End

There is a huge physical presence in his paintings: the hand of the

There is a huge physical presence in his paintings: the hand of the man undisguised in the sweep of a big brush loaded with paint. Physicality aside, the ingredients of Scully’s and Riley’s work are similar: an emphasis on order, structure and method, a basic language of stripes and colour, but the effect of their work is very different.The last show of Scully’s paintings in this country, in 1997, was held in a rather cramped municipal building in Manchester where his huge paintings didn’t quite have the space they need to breathe. Here, happily, we have the opposite scenario with just 11 paintings (seven large, four small) elegantly hung in a beautifully proportioned room. The large paintings, I’d guess, were made specifically with the space in mind and the result is a stunning and surprisingly beautiful exhibition.I say surprisingly because beauty isn’t what Scully’s paintings usually suggest. They are generally impressive and almost always moving in a sombre sort of way, but not quite beautiful, at least not in the manner of Riley’s arrangements of pale pinks and blues and mustards.

Of the seven large pictures, four are ranged down a single wall: Four Large Mirrors, each one made of two 9ft columns of not quite aligned stripes. It’s a very simple format and immensely powerful: each mirror with its own certain mood and each of these contributing to that of the whole. Scully has written eloquently of the melancholy beauty in Mark Rothko’s work: “Nothing in a Rothko is hard, nothing is secure and nothing is definite. He works sadly and constantly against the dying of his own light.” And though his temperament is very different there’s something of the same to be found in Scully’s own paintings. Layers of colour are layered over colour: greys and blues and browns offset by mustard orange and red and, as with Rothko, the effect of these nuances of colour and tone is an ache of longing for something unspecified and not quite grasped.

In a sense, though the components are similar to Riley’s, the effect could hardly be more different. Riley’s are pictures which exist on the surface – the eye is moved on before it can ever come to rest. Scully’s hold still and beg to be stared into forever.Bridget Riley: Paintings from the 1960s & 70s, Serpentine Gallery, London W2 (0171-402 6075), until 18 June. Sean Scully, South London Art Gallery, 65 Peckham Road, (0171-703 6120), until 1 August. I AM examining a small pink tree, vigorously – if not crudely – rendered in oils on paper, when an earnest-looking, youngish man with close-cropped hair and a troubled stare appears from behind a screen and pushes a photocopied sheet into my hand.