Sea Star: Sean Scully
National Gallery London

THIS set of paintings by Sean Scully was particularly inspired by JMW Turner’s monochromatic and melancholic seascape The Evening Star.

Scully’s improvisations on that theme are equally austere and, like Turner’s canvas, demand a prolonged and engaged viewing if their substance is not to be missed.

The minimalism of the swathes of paint mimics sand, sea and sky but they are, in essence, an exploration of the horizon —a soothing reference to eternity and an atavistic calming presence all but obliterated in dense urban contexts.

Irish-born Scully, twice a Turner Prize nominee, endured a childhood of abject depravation and poverty when his mother had to beg in the working-class streets of south London and where he learned self-assertiveness in a street gang.

Yet, like Matisse and Picasso before him, he had a transformative experience when encountering African art.

Unlike Picasso’s experience of the representational art of Ivory Coast masks, Scully was drawn in by the abstract Arabic patterns when travelling in Morocco, with their widespread use of colourful stripes having the most significant impact on him.

Scully applies paint with a broad decorator’s brush and leaves richly textured surfaces, where thin slivers of colour in places separate the wider, potent strokes that project a primaeval and formidable energy.

He has always insisted that he paints for ordinary people, whose responses he anticipates and trusts unlike those of the art establishment or its hanger-on critics.

In 2017 — out of respect for his Mexican hosts — he learned Spanish in preparation for a major exhibition in the capital’s Cuadra San Cristobal a year later and spoke it with admirable fluency and candour throughout the event.

That’s a measure of his engagement with his public, eloquently represented in this highly recommended show.

Runs until August 11, box office: nationalgallery.org.uk