Paul Nash

It's been a five-star February already, with shows by Van Gogh, Van Doesburg and Chris Ofili scoring big, but this might be the one you remember most - whether or not you're new to the work of Paul Nash. An unassuming British surrealist, he was also one of our greatest landscape painters and is up there with JMW Turner, John Constable and Samuel Palmer in my humble estimation.

This exhibition pits Nash needlessly against the theme of 'The Elements', whether of fire, water etc, or of pictorial elements, either in harmony or else in conflict. Elemental though his work surely is, trying to squeeze such open, intense and dreamlike output into a narrow theoretical framework is overcooking of the highest order. Besides, most of us just come to see the pictures.

And what pictures they are. The first room is a knockout, perhaps slightly taking the wind out of the remaining galleries. There are strange interior/exterior views showing the ceiling as sky, the walls as forest and the floor as sea - visions Nash based on seeing disjointed landscapes reflected behind him in a mirror. A glorious yellow field strewn with bits of fighter plane, 'Bomber in the Corn' of 1940, is bathed in several ages of healing light, while his famous depiction of the rutted battlefields and scorched trees of Ypres, 'We Are Making a New World' of 1918, is as poetic as TS Eliot's 'Wasteland' and yet also a statement of fact.

This grouping is meant to display the artist's use of 'Elements in Conflict', but even his most bleak wartime work was unified by an unfailing optimism. Nature will overcome, these pictures seems to promise, no matter how man has treated his fellow man, or how much soil has been turned. 'The sun is God', as Turner said in his last weeks of life.

From solstice to equinox, night to day, Nash made his seas sing and his trees whistle. Not everything is anthropomorphised, although some hills are clearly lady lumps and standing stones their male equivalents. Instead, he painted the landscape as a visceral, tangible entity and gets as close as Van Gogh did to actually committing earth to canvas. His sense of place is extraordinary too, but his unique ability was in transforming local Kent or Dorset landmarks - like his beloved wooded copses, the Whittenham Clumps, or a derelict mineshaft - into totems with supernatural, symbolic powers. He identified with his surroundings in a way that few of us can today, but he left a path through his mind's eye open for us to take.