Sean Scully loves paint. The canvases on show here are liberally smeared with oils, so that every movement of Scully’s hand lingers on the surface, as if he has only just completed each work. This self-re­f­er­en­cing phys­ic­al­ity is matched by an un­der­stand­ing of colour. In Green Corner, Scully fills his trademark grid with muted hues, lifted by a shock of deep orange. His wa­ter­co­l­ours and prints are softer, without the strict de­lin­ea­tion of the paintings: in Day, soft pinks blur into blacks, and Black Corner sees light marks hardly holding back the blocks of amber and green.

If all that sounds familiar, it should - Scully is widely held up as the natural heir to American painters of a certain stripe who plied their trade in the middle of the last century. Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning both loom large (both, like Scully, European painters who emigrated to the US, and found fame there) and his work is firmly en­trenched in the aesthetic of those painters, and their fellow Abstract Ex­pres­sion­ists.

And so, wherever Scully’s work is shown, there is an elephant in the room: what on earth is Scully doing making work like this now?

He is far from being a copyist, but he is a follower, painting himself into the very corner the artists he admires sought to escape. There is no en­gage­ment with earlier abstract painting here, no sense that Scully is pushing his medium forward, or engaging on any mean­ing­ful level with his forebears. And so his work comes per­il­ously close to being kitsch, in the sense that critic Clement Greenberg railed against when cham­pi­on­ing the work of Rothko, de Kooning et al. It is not developed in response to the ever-changing world and the art in it, but is trapped in a tradition; a way of working that is an­ti­thet­ic­al to the aims of the artists Scully draws in­spir­a­tion from.

These paintings and prints are not es­pe­ci­ally un­pleas­ant to look at, then, but there is something deeply un­sa­t­is­fy­ing about them, and a sour taste is all that is left after the first flush of contact with Scully’s way with paint and colour fades. This, perhaps, is down to an over­bear­ing, even smug, tendency in Scully’s work. ‘Look at us,’ these paintings and prints seem to say, ‘we are very important, very important indeed.’ They might well have been, long ago. But not now.