Bridget Riley

First of all, in terms of the actual works by Bridget Riley on display, there are some absolute corkers here. In particular, there’s one of her magisterial ‘Op’ patterns from the ‘60s, its undulating 3D effect making for literally nauseating viewing. Then there’s an equally mesmerising work from the ’80s, a colour study in thin vertical stripes, in which repeated hues appear strikingly different depending on which others they’re surrounded by.

Finally, her recent works’ dancing, scythe-like forms – made by crisscrossing sinusoidal lines with diagonals – convey a more expressive, emotive idea of colour: green-orange-blue on a white gallery wall, for instance, suggesting a luminous impetuousness; while the addition of dusky purple, on a neighbouring canvas, gives a haughty, glowering feel. Only the largest piece, a wall decorated with overlapping and contiguous circles, feels a little flat and arbitrary.

And yet, for all that her works themselves generally dazzle, there’s something that doesn’t sit quite right about the whole rationale for the exhibition. Outside the main space are paintings from the permanent collection: Raphael’s colourful depiction of Saint Catherine; a trompe-l’oeil imitation of a sculptural frieze by Andrea Mantegna; and three preparatory studies by Seurat for his pointillist masterpiece, ‘Bathers at Asnières’. The idea is that these works, chosen by Riley, both reflect her longstanding love of the National Gallery (hanging opposite is a copy she painted as a 17 year old of a Van Eyck self-portrait), and also demonstrate how her work, and abstract art in general, shares certain formal qualities with figuration – specifically, concerns to do with illusory depth, movement and dynamism, and colour effects.

The problem is, such thoughts will presumably only be revelatory if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t much like abstraction to begin with (which, to be honest, probably covers a fair proportion of the National Gallery’s audience). In which case, surely, the figurative works end up as a sort of justification for Riley’s art – as if she was simply following precedent, rather than excelling in a new language all of her own.